Podcast appearances and mentions of brandon dyson

Welcome to episode 6 of 15 in my Pharmacist Authors Series!  My guest is Tony Guerra, PharmD.  Join us as we discuss his Pharmacist Residency and Career Series (8 books).  Stay tuned until the VERY end of the episode to hear Tony narrate a sample from Book 1 in the series.   Thank you for listening to episode 225 of The Pharmacist's Voice ® Podcast! To read the FULL show notes, visit https://www.thepharmacistsvoice.com/podcast.  Click on episode 225. Subscribe to or follow The Pharmacist's Voice ® Podcast to get each episode delivered to your podcast player and YouTube each time a new one comes out.   Apple Podcasts   https://apple.co/42yqXOG  Google Podcasts  https://bit.ly/3J19bws  Spotify  https://spoti.fi/3qAk3uY  Amazon/Audible  https://adbl.co/43tM45P YouTube https://bit.ly/43Rnrjt Bio  Tony Guerra, PharmD, originally from the Baltimore-Washington corridor, has combined creative writing work with his experience to author over 30 books.  He's either written and/or produced books in four major categories, pharmacology, pharmacotherapy, career/residency, and professional school admissions and interviews. He has taught college pharmacology and chemistry for over a decade and a half and lives in Ankeny, Iowa, with his wife Mindy and triplet daughters Brielle, Rianne, and Teagan. You can work with him at https://residency.teachable.com/courses/ or hear his podcasts at pharmacy.libsyn.com and memorizing.libsyn.com  Highlights from our interview Tony is an English major. His expertise is in writing and helping people tell their story.  He's more of a writing expert than than a residency expert.  Tony helps pharmacy students one-on-one write a Letter of Intent.  The goal is to find a pharmacist residency that's a good fit.  According to Tony, it's very hard for pharmacists to talk about themselves and to do a “humble brag."  The audience for this 8-part books series is pharmacy students, namely P2's for 3-year programs and P3's for 4-year programs.  Students, read these books as you start those years of school! Tony loves audiobooks, and he understands the need for them for his readers.  However, depending on the length of the book, Tony sometimes hires narrators instead of narrating the books himself.  Tune in to hear his advice for pharmacist authors who want to narrate their own audiobooks.   Pharmacist Residency and Career Series (8 books) amazon.com links The Strong Residency Letter of Intent: Writing to Be Interviewed with a Cover Letter that Earns the Invite (Pharmacist Residency and Career Series Book 1)  by Tony Guerra Residency Interview Help: In Case of Interview Invitation, Break Glass (Pharmacist Residency and Career Series Book 2) by Tony Guerra https://bit.ly/44876qx  100 Strong Residency Interview Questions, Answers, and Rationales for the Residency Match (Pharmacist Residency and Career Series Book 3) by Brandon Dyson and Tony Guerra (audiobook available)  Phone Interview Survival Tips: Job Interview Questions and Answers for Introverts and Extroverts (Pharmacist Residency and Career Series Book 4) by Tony Guerra Crushing the Phase 2 Pharmacy Residency Match: Proven Tactics to Earn a Clinical Pharmacist Training Position (Pharmacist Residency and Career Series Book 5) by Tony Guerra Finding Your Unicorn Job for Pharmacists: Financial Freedom, Flexible Hours, and Personal Fulfillment Beyond the Pharmacy Counter (Pharmacist Residency and Career Series Book 6) by Tony Guerra READ THIS BEFORE PHARMACY RESIDENCY: The Right Moves on the Road to a Residency Match (Pharmacist Residency and Career Series Book 7) by Tony Guerra, Chase DiMarco, and Gene Rodden Strong Ambulatory Care Residency Letter of Intent: Writing Cover Letters that Earn Multiple Interview Invites (Pharmacist Residency and Career Series Book 8) by Callie Abramowitz and Tony Guerra Links from this episode The Pharmacist's Voice ® Podcast Episode 156 featuring Tony Guerra, PharmD Pharmacy Residency Podcast

On this week's episode of The PQI Podcast, we sit down with Brandon Dyson, PharmD, BCOP, BCPS to discuss his role at Texas Oncology, the creation of tl;dr pharmacy, and the importance of mentoring pharmacy students. Brandon is the Area Pharmacy Manager for the Central/South Texas and San Antonio regions of Texas Oncology. He is Co-Founder of the pharmacy education website, tl;dr pharmacy, and serves as the Residency Program Director at Texas Oncology for the NCODA Medically Integrated Oncology Pharmacy (MIOP) Residency ProgramYou can find more information on tl;dr pharmacy here: https://www.tldrpharmacy.com.You can find more information on NCODA's Medically Integrated Oncology Pharmacy Residency Program here: https://www.ncoda.org/miop-residency-program/.

This month, we spoke with Dr. Brandon Dyson, PharmD, BCOP, co-founder of TL;DR Pharmacy, to hear about his resources for pharmacy students as well as how students can improve essential communication skills that may not be taught in an academic environment. In this month's Mental Health Minute, Dr. Jessica Louie, PharmD, APh, BCCCP, tackled common myths about burnout.  For more information on TL;DR Pharmacy, check out https://www.tldrpharmacy.com/  To learn more from Dr. Jessica Louie, check out https://drjessicalouie.com/ 

I wanted to give you a preview of the book Brandon Dyson from TLDRPharmacy.com and I wrote with a Top 100 questions list for residency interviews. You can find the audiobook preview here. We will be including 100 video questions in the Rock Star Interview course as well that you can find here: https://residency.teachable.com/p/interview

Each Friday in June 2022, I'm publishing an interview with a pharmacist dad in honor of Father's Day, which is Sunday, June 19. This episode is an interview with Tony Guerra, PharmD.  During the first half of our conversation, we discuss how Tony uses his voice as a pharmacist.  In the second half, we focus on Tony's role as a Dad.   Thank you for listening to episode 156 of The Pharmacist's Voice ® Podcast! To read the full show notes, visit https://www.thepharmacistsvoice.com.  Click on the podcast tab, and search for episode 156.   Tony Guerra, M.HCI., Pharm.D., is a pharmacist who helps students write their way into a residency by helping them with their interviews, CVs, and letters of intent.  He lives in Ankeny, Iowa with his wife and triplet daughters.  You can find The Pharmacy Residency Podcast on iTunes or at  https://pharmacyresidencypodcast.com/  You can find his courses at https://residency.teachable.com/   You can find his audiobooks on Audible from career to pharmacology and pharmacotherapy here https://www.audible.com/author/Tony-Guerra/B00AECS0ZG  He welcomes you to join and subscribe to his TonyPharmD YouTube channel has 35,000 subscribers https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd  Highlights from our conversation Tony uses his voice as a pharmacist in a number of ways. He has experience in retail pharmacy.  Now, he's a college professor, podcaster, online course creator, author, husband, father of 3, youth sports coach, and more.   Some pharmacists have learned that traditional, clinical pharmacist hours are fundamentally incompatible with being a good parent.   Tony reveled the #1 reason someone does not get a residency.  He also gave advice about writing a residency letter of intent. Tony is an entrepreneur.  He finds a need and fills the gap.  Many pharmacists feel guilty about getting paid to do something outside traditional, clinical practice.  Tony pointed out that providing free resources as well as paid resources is a good way to overcome that guilt.   As an experienced author, Tony talked about how long it takes to go from idea to published and described how long it takes for a normal book compared to a book that he recently published with Brandon Dyson, PharmD at an accelerated pace.  Tony also shared tips on writing a book.  How can women get men to read books, like Tony Guerra's Without Being Asked: How Can Dads and Kids Help Organize and Declutter To Reduce Family Burnout?  Tony suggested putting it in, “Fix-it language” or, “Guy speak.”   Tony shares individual drug name pronunciations on his YouTube channel.  To learn more, visit https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd.   Visit https://residency.teachable.com to learn more about Tony's online courses.  Topics include pharmacology and pharmacy residencies.   Tony has been married since 2007, and has triplet daughters, age 10.  We discussed a range of “Dad” topics, including:  Apologizing “Dad time-outs” Being present and not letting career get in the way of being present Fertility issues Praise for his wife during her long hospital bedrest His daughters' 3 month stay in the NICU Advice to pharmacist dads on when to have a child/children Biggest challenges of fatherhood Favorite things about fatherhood Kids and sports/extracurricular activities Raising kids is expensive.  We discussed an expense that surprised Tony. General advice for current or prospective pharmacist dads. Mentioned in this episode Tony Guerra, Pharmacist LinkedIn Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonypharmd/  Tony's YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd   Audiobooks https://www.audible.com/author/Tony-Guerra/B00AECS0ZG  Tony Guerra author profile on amazon.com  Books mentioned in this episode Without Being Asked: How Can Dads and Kids Help Organize and Declutter To Reduce Family Burnout? by Tony Guerra  Finding Your Unicorn Job for Pharmacists:  Financial Freedom, Flexible Hours, and Personal Fulfillment Beyond the Pharmacy Counter (Pharmacist Residency and Career Series Book 6) by Tony Guerra How to Pronounce Drug Names:  A Visual Approach to Preventing Medication Errors by Tony Guerra  100 Strong Residency Interview Questions, Answers, and Rationales by Tony Guerra and Brandon Dyson, et al. Pharmfluencers:  The Inspiring Stories of Pharmacy Entrepreneurs by Kimber Boothe How Not to Hate your Husband After Kids by Jancee Dunn  How Pharmacists Lead:  Answers from Women Who Are Leading, Succeeding, and Impacting Pharmacy by Hillary Blackburn, PharmD If You're in My Office, It's Already Too Late:  A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together by James J. Sexton The Five Love Languages:  The Secret to Love That Lasts by Gary Chapman The University of Toledo College of Pharmacy https://www.utoledo.edu/pharmacy/  Online courses (Pharmacy Residency Podcast Courses) https://residency.teachable.com  Todd Eury LinkedIn Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddeury/  Pharmacy Podcast Network https://pharmacypodcast.com  Check out Tony's podcasts:  Pharmacy Future Leaders Podcast Pharmacy Residency Podcast Thank you for listening to episode 156 of The Pharmacist's Voice ® Podcast! Please share this episode!  

"The physician is going in my little black book of people I'd never let treat me!" What pharmacist hasn't said this before? Professional shaming at it's finest! Well this episode we discuss why that leads to bad healthcare and a toxic environment with Brandon Dyson of tl;dr Pharmacy. You might think why is this on a politics podcast? Well if we want to expand scope of adequate providers with an aging population (eyes AMA) then we need to have better respect and understanding for what we all do, know our own limits and practice to them. You can find tl;dr pharmacy here: https://www.tldrpharmacy.com/ Connect with Dr. Dyson here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-dyson-pharmd-bcop-bcps-3aa89633/ Read the article that prompted this here: https://www.tldrpharmacy.com/content/the-epidemic-of-professional-shaming?utm_sq=gou3b31v27&utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Brandon+Dyson&utm_content=Own+Blog+Posts

How do you get better at pharmacy? With all of the complexities of our profession, the answer of understanding more…is complicating less. That is, to simplify pharmacy. That's exactly what our guest has been doing for years through his blog and business you most likely have heard of: tl;dr pharmacy. Brandon Dyson is a practicing, board certified, residency-trained pharmacist, who is a teacher and licensed pharmacy student preceptor. So to say the least, he knows pharmacy students— and he knows how hard it is to absorb the amount of material that gets thrown at you during pharmacy school. He also knows how hard it is to keep up with it all when you are practicing as a pharmacist, so he along with his friend Sam Oh created tl;dr pharmacy to make your pharmacy life easier. "Pharmacy, simplified" is the tl;dr pharmacy brand, and we dive into all things brand building on this week's podcast—you will want to take some notes! Resources Mentioned: -Free Pharmacy Cheat Sheets: https://bit.ly/2WHPwsJ -Personal Branding COURSE: Script Your Brand— www.scriptyourbrand.com Like The Fit Pharmacist on Facebook: www.facebook.com/fitpharmfam Main Points: -The gap filler and dot connector brand in pharmacy education -Best practice tips for starting your pharmacy brand from one of the best in the profession -Why having a personal brand is essential for your pharmacy career -Obstacles to anticipate and how to overcome them in building your personal brand -Personal brand course backed by results to script your dream career Guest: Brandon Dyson, PharmD, BCPS -Instagram: www.instagram.com/tldrpharmacy -Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tldrpharmacy -LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tl-dr-pharmacy -Website: https://www.tldrpharmacy.com Host: Adam Martin, PharmD, ACSM-CPT, NAMS-CNC -Website: www.thefitpharmacist.com -LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/fitpharmfam -Instagram: www.instagram.com/thefitpharmacist -YouTube: bit.ly/2x2urwl -Podcast: www.thefitpharmacist.com/podcast

In this episode, our guest is Brandon Dyson is the co-founder of the website www.tldrpharmacy.com, which is the dot-connector and gap-filler of your pharmacy education. Tl;dr pharmacy simplifies complex topics and teaches you the hands-on, real world skills that you need to stand out in a crowded market. Brandon also manages an outpatient oncology pharmacy, and is an Assistant Professor for the Georgetown University School of Nursing. He will share: - all things tl;dr pharmacy - his role as the manager of an oncology infusion and retail pharmacy - a bit about his side hustle where he teaches pharmacology to NP students online through Georgetown University Interview with Brandon Dyson @tldrpharmacy on Facebook and Instagram. Host - Hillary Blackburn, PharmD www.pharmacyadvisory.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/hillary-blackburn-67a92421/ @talktoyourpharmacist for Instagram and Facebook @HillBlackburn Twitter

Brandon Dyson returns with a two part series on Residency Interview Questions. He is the founder of  www.tldrpharmacy.com - which provides cheat sheets and easy to understand overviews of dense clinical topics. He is a clinical pharmacist for an academic medical center in Austin, Texas and an Assistant Professor of pharmacology for the online nurse practitioner program at the Georgetown University School of Nursing. He graduated from Howard University College of Pharmacy and completed a PGY1 practice residency at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC. He is board certified in pharmacotherapy. He can be reached at brandon@tldrpharmacy.com In this show we first talk about the dos and don'ts of the pharmacy interview, then in Part II it's game on for a mock interview. Will he get the residency? Okay, okay, he got a residency at Georgetown, so he's qualified.  He’ll trade you one email address on his website for an: Antibiotic Cheat Sheet Residency/Job Interview Evaluation Form Chapter 1 of the book, Pharmacy School: The Missing Manual Full Transcript: I'm so excited to have Brandon Dyson back to help us out and we're going to have a back-and-forth as if I was the residency director or interviewer and he'll be the interviewee. But he's not only going to just talk about the answers he's going to give the rationale for them. And a number of these questions come from his book but I've thrown him a couple of curveballs and I know you're going to enjoy this episode. Let's get into some questions because I'm excited to see how you tackle them and so let's actually start with a softball. I call it a softball. Softballs on the preface, right? I have no idea which questions he's going to ask me and I did not prepare answers which you should prepare. Let me also say that. So, anyway yeah, let's do this. Okay describe a time when you decided on your own that something needed to be done and you took on the task to get it done. So this is all about so what I'll do when I enter these if you're cool with that Tony and I will kind of give you an example answer if I was a student and then I'll kind of describe my thought process in that answer, is that okay? Yeah, check the podcast manual. Its okay, so we're good, we're good. I'm not going to violate the podcast rules but I was checking the podcast scroll, it's very old. Podcast scroll is very, you're really pulling it off in how the podcast looks. Yeah okay, so at a time when you decided on your own, now, before you answer the question let's say I'm someone that's anxious freaking out borderline ATD, as this person's asking the question. Is it appropriate to write the question down as they're asking it? You're probably not going to have a piece of paper. Like at this point for most of these interview quite. Because this might be happening literally while you're eating lunch maybe not this severe but it's not inappropriate to write it down. But it's not it's, you probably won't need to probably what will be better is if you need to think of an answer. Reflect it? You can reflect it you can be like so a time when I, you know. Yeah, yeah. Like rephrase it a little. You can also say, let me think about that for a moment. Do not spend four minutes at that point. It's just going to be weird but take a moment, you know, and think about it and again most of these questions. You know, unless they're just trying to have fun with you like I kind of asked, if you were a melon what type of melon would you like they're just trying to mess with you at that point in time. And then you're thinking, oh gosh was that a fruit, a vegetable, a melon. Was that a melon? What does it mean if I want to say cantaloupe? And they're sitting there doing their quiz online like, oh, this is a, it is a melon. It's a melon. At that point they're seeing like questions like that, they're like do you have a sense of humor and like how do you roll with it, you know, if we mess with you a little. Like anyway and I've used a great tactic of stalling in this question. You have? Okay. So obviously not getting the thing done I'm asking you which is just answer the freaking first question but describe a time you decided on your own that something needed to be done and you took on the task to get it done. So I, this happened at, I was interning for Walgreens and I noticed that we had a lot. There was a big order that got put away they were very busy backed up and I was an intern and my technical job at this particular at least on this shift I was supposed to be manning the registers and doing flu shots. But it just, you know, someone called out and, you know, we were very backed up, very busy. The pharmacist was having a hard time keeping up with filling and so I was able to go in and kind of very in between and I never I made sure to keep an eye on the register and with flu shots and everything and I helped put away the order and helped fill meds and I just, it was just really doing everything I could to kind of keep the flow going. So that was Brandon's, you know, sort of somewhat, you know, answer. So thought process going into that answer would be, you want to you want to showcase that you take initiative. You see something that needs to get done for whatever it is it doesn't need to be for, you know, that didn't actually happen in my Walgreens experience I was completely made up on the spot but the idea is like are you self-motivated, do you need to be told, do you need to have your boss or your manager be like, okay, go do this thing, you finish that thing great go do this thing. You want to write it, you want to come up with an answer that shows you just taking initiative that you're self motivated self-starter and if you notice a thing, you know, whether that be hey, I didn't realize like on this oncology rotation what our chop was and so I went and looked up our chop and what kind of cancer it was treated for because I saw in the medical note that the patient received three cycles of our chop so far, you know, like you did you go and look up what that was and what it was for versus like then, versus instead of asking me, your preceptor hey, you got our chop what's our chop, right? Like it's looking for, do you take initiative basically? I don’t know if they have highlight still in the dentist office but there used to be a goofus and gallant and like goofus, when, you know, goofus sits and doesn't answer the door gallant gets up and answers the door. And really if you can instead of, you know, saying oh my gosh, I've got to come up with this really great scenario all you have to do is just say, you know, I saw somebody had gum on their shoe I told them they had gum on their shoe, I helped them throw it away, you know. It's like just, you know, it's just, it sounds like it's common sense but I can I feel like the kind of a-plus type student is going to try to make a huge deal out of something that's just, are you going to do things that you're supposed to do. A word of caution too is make sure that you don't come across as standoff-ish. Like well this other person wasn't doing their job and it felt like I need it to get done so I did it, you know, because that really like that takes the shift of you being self-motivated leader and you complaining and just throwing shade on other people and that's not, you know, don't do that. So be very careful how you phrase it. Okay, all right. Well, let's go to another question I think that that format is going to work really well. Let's talk about a difficult work school situation when your workload was heavy and how you handled it. So let's say that in your in your CV you have a 16 hour a week job at the hospital while you were a p3 because you had to support yourself for the most part to go through school and you weren't given a tremendous amount of scholarship money and so 16 hours a week is how much you had to work. Okay, so I mean this is an easy one for anyone on pharmacy school especially if you're working. So I was working, I had to do the, I had signed up for 16 hours a week so that was my whole weekend. I work two eight-hour shifts or sometimes I would be off on Sunday and I would work two four-hour shifts on my evenings during the week to 8 and 8 and I'd work a Saturday. If this happened a particular week where I had to work Tuesday and Thursday night from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. and I had exams on Wednesday and I had exams on Thursday. So I had I had exams both days, these were really hard PT exams, you know, really difficult subject matter and so I, you know, I have to study. But I've also made a commitment to the hospital not only do I need the money but I made a commitment. I signed up to do it, no one, you know, and so what I had to do was really try to, you know, in the hospital I work in a level 1 trauma center as an intern so we're very very busy we're always stocking omni-cells or, you know, that's what I was doing this particular week. And it was just a particularly it was a completely full patient loaded and so really the way I had to prioritize it was I had to just be, I had what I mapped out my week basically. So I said, okay, here are my hours, here's the things that I need to get done. I need to study, you know, I estimated based off of what I've had in school so far how long I need to study for a given exam. And then I blocked out responsibilities where I couldn't study so I can't study at Tuesday to Thursday 4 to 8 those are out. I can't study, you know, this other time because I'm eating or I'm sleeping or whatever and then the rest was fitting in times that I could study, you know, I was in class these times, I can't study. But what I could do I woke up a little bit earlier nothing crazy but I woke up at 5:00 a.m. and I studied for an hour or two before school. I studied for a little bit before bed I had recorded my professor's lectures and I listened to them during my commute to try to absorb more. I read TL DRpharmacy.com they had this, I had to. So your answer I guess here, you know, just is that you can make priorities, right? You can prioritize what's most important. You might get, if you don't even have to balance work and school on this kind of a question. You can just say from work well I was, you know, let's go back to what I just said for the last answer. I was an intern at Walgreens there was a tote of things that needed to be put away. There was patients, you know, asking to pick up their prescriptions here, the drive-thru was ringing and I needed to go to the bathroom which order did I do those things in, right? Like your answer needs to prioritize the patient first 100%, right? So you get to get the counter then the drive-thru. First you tell the drive-thru guy to hold on, right? There's not necessarily a correct way to answer it. But it just shows that you prioritize what's most important and delegate, you know, if you're unable to finish your task whatever it is at the hospital for example, that you pass it on to the next shift or to, you know, or to yourself tomorrow if like oh, I didn't study enough today so can I study, I have to study extra time tomorrow. And it sounds like. Yeah. It sounds like you're talking what you did that was a little surprising and then what impressed me was that you actually went backwards in time. So I feel like most people trying to answer that question would be at the problem and say, okay, well there was a problem and how did I deal with it? Instead of saying well there's a problem and I had that really tough time but what I learned was that there was gaps in my planning so the next time that actually didn't happen because I planned out my week. So I feel like you're going back in time was a really clever way to solve that to say, I knew this was going to happen, things don't happen to me intentionally or things don't happen that way. It's, you know, so you're giving them the impression like, okay well that might happen one time to you and it was bad but it's not going to be as bad next time because you adjust to problems. Yeah you learn from past experience, learn from mistakes. Okay. If you can showcase that with your answers, awesome. Okay, well let's talk pharmacy specific, so questions on pharmacy topics. This is and I feel like you could go with the well I wasn't really sure about the job market so residency is my background. So I'm really kind of hoping that you take me because I really didn't plan on not getting accepted. So we're really hoping this works out. But I think that, you know, in terms of I'll just ask the question, but in terms of just kind of broad picking up what's going on in pharmacy, where do you recommend someone pick up or keep up with pharmacy, you know, you can read that okay, Amazon's coming, Amazon's not coming, you know, do you have to be up on the Affordable Care Act, you know, did you read the thousand pages, you know, how up on what's going on in pharmacy do you need to be before you can even answer a question like that? I think, if you just are up enough on the headlines so that you can have a reasonably intelligent conversation you do not have to be like, oh yeah, well Amazon's got this 12-point strategy for, you know. Right. Entering into the, you know, like or your answer could be bow down before the Amazon ship and just accept but they will employ us all soon but. Right or Alexa will be giving, Alexa's like, I've been answering your questions long enough it's your turn. So a question like that about like where do you see the field of pharmacy going or whatever, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like it's really designed like are you interested in the profession, like it's that's really what it is. It's not like testing you, your current event knowledge or you're a student you're studying a trillion hours a week, right? It's just, are you in? Because if you're interested you'll just, you'll pick up on stuff like this, you know, and it's just, it's a casual question honestly like kind of looking at do you pay outside, pay attention to that bubble outside of what you need to know as a student for the next exam. You know, and kind of look at the trends for the profession as a whole and then are you thoughtful about it, you know, how do you insert yourself and how do you plan, you know, is residency a part of your strategy for that or what's your endgame, you know. Okay, well this one this next one's going to be a trap I just read the first line and I know exactly how you can go wrong on this one. So what was your favorite Eppy and Appy rotation and why, what was your least favorite Eppy and Appy rotations and why? This has trap written all over it. Yeah, you have walked directly. Okay, so my favorite Eppy rotation was infectious disease for a few reasons, a large part of it. I absolutely loved the preceptor. She was fantastic. She was very, you know, gave me autonomy while at the same time providing, you know, exactly like perfect real-world instruction. She was very, she let me do a lot, she let me interview patients, she let me interview physicians and round with the team. And I just, I felt like I really grew a lot and in an area that really interested me and I learned, you know, what kind of like if I were to ever be a teacher or a preceptor I would want to be like her and I really really grew to love the area of infectious disease. My least favorite rotation was I had a trend, I had rotation with the transplant team. A solid organ transplant, very very busy and it just, I guess what I disliked it, like the area has never particularly interested me that was part of it. The team was very large, there were three nurse practitioners. There was literally a half a dozen resident plus and attending, you know, there was my pre, there was two pharmacy preceptors that were there on it. Like so it was this giant team walking around the sick unit and then walking around the medicine unit, afterwards seeing patients and, you know, honestly though I think where, why it was, you know, I would have done a lot differently with that rotation. So it was my least favorite but I think on that I didn't step up enough. I felt very timid as a student. I had no idea even what tackle line this is, what problems this is they, you know, and how do I adjust a dose for someone that's two-month post transplant, you know, that has now come in with C and B infection, you know, like I had no idea what to do with the multitude. Now they've got tuberculosis and they started ripe therapy, you know, I and honestly I felt like I didn't ask enough questions. I was too timid and I was so focused on hey, these, this is a transplant patient that I would forget entirely that I knew how to manage their blood sugar that was too high and I knew that, you know, their blood pressure that was too high. So I would have like, I really it was my least favorite rotation for the challenge but I also learned a lot about how I can approach other rotations in it. So what I'm going for there the trap that you want to avoid is your least favorite obviously where you just talk nothing but smack about this piece and then this team that you had. Even if you feel like it's warranted it doesn't matter now is not the time, you know. Pharmacy is small. There's chance that the person that you slam, it's like, oh yeah, I know them we're buddies, we hang out at ASHP when we meet up together. We graduated together, you know. Yeah. So, you just, you want to be careful with that. Really you're taking a negative experience with your least-favorite you want to turn that as much into a positive as possible. What did you learn from it? So, just kind of like that last question. You had this terrible experience, cool. Why was it that terrible? And more importantly like, what did you get out of it? Well I guess what I was impressed with is that what you didn't do was say, well I didn't really have any ones that I didn't like. Yeah. Can you do that? Can you, can you pull that one or are they, because I feel like the way that, you know, when I was around residency I, we all got along really well and I feel like if all of us were there watching you we'd be sitting there with our thumbs going down like, boo boo, you know, boo. Popcorn, tomatoes, yeah. So. I don't like doing it. I don't, I'm not a fan of it. If you do it, have a good reason why and still talk about, you know, I, you can or hedge, hedge if you need to. So like, oh I really liked all of them I guess a challenge, you know, one that I found particularly challenging and that I think I grew a lot from and it was really difficult in the time which was very stressful. You can like, kind of soften it or hedge it that way if you feel like you have to like, you have to get some lesson. It's a complete and total cop-out to be like, I don't have any clue, next question. Okay, but I can see how someone might not. I just talked at Tola Adebanjo from UMES and she had the Hopkins residency training one, she had APHA and then she was at the VA near her own where she could spend time with their family. So there was these three great rotations that are warm hugs and, you know, to say least favorite it would it would have to be well this was maybe in the least favorite part of us right in one of the rotations but yeah never to say no. Now did I, I did ask you two questions in pharmacy so, let's see about your professional growth. So how would you categorize a PGY-1 residency as another learning experience or as the beginnings of a career path or job and why? So, both, honestly both, I see it as both, you know, it's been kind of said to me throughout school that a residency is equivalent of about three years of clinical experience. I've talked to plenty of my peers who've gone through residencies and have an idea of what to expect and I know it's a very very challenging year. But that there's a lot of growth, there's a lot of learning involved, there's, you know, as accelerated of a growth year as I think you can have in the field of pharmacy. So it's absolutely a learning experience but at the same time I'm a licensed pharmacist in a residency and I'm, you know, there's a staffing component to this residency. I'm the pharmacist making the call, one of this treatment appropriate or not and, you know, I'm going on rounds with the team and, you know, maybe the first day or first couple of days of the new rotation or even the first week early on my preceptor may round with me. But they're going to stop rounding with me based off what I've heard from my friends that have gone through residency anyway. And it's on me to be the pharmacist for the team at that point in time. So it really is the beginnings of a career path and me personally I want to kind of transition this into a PGY-2 and infectious disease and so this is, you know, a necessary step for that. I can't get a PGY-2 without a PGY-1 obviously so I really see this as both. Now you didn't do a PGY-2 but go ahead and explain your answer. Yeah, yeah I did not. So again I'm making these up on the spot so I've just explained, what I'm saying with this is, one, yes your residency is absolutely a learning year but I think the meat behind this question is are you ready to take the jump from student to pharmacist. And I'm just speaking completely plainly, it took me almost my entire PGY-1 to really get that. Like I should probably, that was like my hero struggle throughout my PGY-1 was branded really, finally ready to be a big boy now, you know. And the hero's journey for those of you that don't know is it's what Luke Skywalker did basically. Something tragic happens, he meets conflict, he goes on a journey, he learned something from it. I don't know if meeting your father is part of it but there's a pact to the hero's journey and it involves that conflict and so forth but did you have anything else to add after that? No that's primarily it. Just see a question like this, make sure that you understand that even though a residency is a learning experience, it's a job. You're interviewing for an actual job, you will be receiving an actual paycheck, they are hiring you to do X Y & Z and you are absolutely going to be a licensed pharmacist as contingent on your residency. So you do have to see it as the beginning of a career path as well. I think in the book I probably say something like I answer this with yes and yes I think it's my, like let me cheat and look yeah, I did. So I said I answered this with yes and yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well let's ask a softball question that actually can be incredibly difficult. So you told us you're not interested in a PGY-2. What's your one-year goal then? Where you come in in July, you leave in July or you leave at the end of June? Where do you see yourself? My idea with this, with the PG, with my one year goal, so I don't want to do it PGY-2. What we all did PGY-2s. Yeah, no so, I mean and maybe I'm open to it, I'm open to changing my mind. I want to, what I want to set myself up for is flexibility more than anything. I want to, to me if I learn the skills that's what I will get out of one year of residency training is, you know, I'm going to go on an ID rotation, I'm going to go on a transplant, on an oncology rotation. I'm going to have a practice management rotation. I'm going to be inserted in and be expected to perform at the pharmacist at a high level for all of these things. And what I think I'm really going to get out of that is the ability to pick up basically anything. So that if my career takes me into such a path that an oncology specialist position opens up even if I haven't done a PGY-2 or maybe not a specialist but a position in oncology or a position in transplant or maybe my family decides they have to move. And, you know, I have the skills necessary to transition what I've learned, to learn as a pharmacist, to learn on the job, to contribute and to be a team player and to get to help contribute where, you know, anywhere that my career takes me. It gives me the flexibility to apply my skills and be a valued pharmacist to actually add value to the, wherever I'm working. That's what I want to get out of one year out of this. Awesome, okay, well let's transition to the last section which is personality related questions and I'm going to adjust it a little bit just to kind of make it a little bit more of a softball or maybe just make it a little more authentic but. So I'm a marathoner even though I'm arrested right now I'm still getting my runs in. I get a long two-hour run or three-hour run there on Sunday. What is it that you like to do outside of the pharmacy? What do you do for fun? So I, a few things, I am very active in a church group and so we do a lot of youth mentoring where, you know, obviously every Sunday but we do stuff throughout the week as well. We'll have, you know, it's with a youth group of, they're primarily between 12 and 14 years old, 12 and 15 and we'll, I mean anything we'll go to the local basketball court, you know, we'll organize a basketball game or we'll have, you know, a punch party or something, you know. So we do things like that. I'm also a pretty avid guitar player. I played guitar since I was 13. I've, I don't play in a band specifically right now but I played in bands all through high school. Yeah, I'll play in odd wedding or so for a friend here, there. So I really enjoy playing guitar blues, rock, country, really anything. I just, I love the instrument and the flexibility and the voice of it. So I like to spend a lot of free time there and that's sort of my wind down as, you know, a few minutes on a guitar can really just kind of reset my calm, you know, at the end of the night. Yeah, Churchill used to paint, you know. Yeah, yeah. And he's dealing with world war two and he's off painting. And you're like, painting and just you know if you have that kind of stress you really do need a place where you do something completely different and don't underestimate the opportunity to connect with someone there that has that same thing and, you know, for the eight hours you have someone else might remember, oh yeah that was the runner, oh yeah that was the one with and they're really trying to make it so that they can remember you and the one thing besides some kind of mistake maybe you made or, you know, oh ketchup on the collar or whatever it is. But this is the one time that if you are authentic that you're probably going to find someone else that that has something similar in there and they're going to remember you because of it. So let's go completely vague on the final question here. List some personal attributes that you would like to improve and what have you done to improve them? So what's wrong with you? I am flawless. So don't use that answer. Oh that's a flaw, isn’t that what Socrates said? Yeah, you're brilliant, damn, real philosophical tonight. So, a few things, it's a blessing and a curse. I see things from a 10,000 foot view, you know, and I always have. I see the big picture I see how it all works together and how it all fits and that is a wonderful thing for men, you know, for studying for pharmacy school. That's what got me here to this interview. It's done a lot of great things for me at the same time you, when you see from 10,000 feet you sometimes miss a really important detail and so while I won't, I don't necessarily get mired down in details all the time and get overwhelmed with, you know, I can see where the system has to move and I know how to prioritize. I might miss that, you know, this happened a couple of times on a pharmacy test where I missed, you know, which of the following is not indicated or something, you know, I missed all that. Circle the dot. Yeah, I missed that all-important word and you know it's the devil is in the details. So what I do and it's just like you said, I take that pause, you know, I pause for a minute and I briefly review before doing, you know, before I answer the test question. I do, you know, and I make sure, okay here's what it says, there is no polarity word that changes it for not to or except or anything and then I answer. And so really I, the way I do it I had to physically train myself to take a breath before either circling the scantron or some of our tests are on a computer now before I hit the submit button I literally take a breath, it takes one second. And it's, that's my reset to make sure I don't just go down some memorized neuro pathway and just click the button or circle the dot. Okay so we've gone through your document the one thing I wanted to talk about and then this is going to also segway into probably what our next conversation is going to be in. I may even chop this one in half because we've gone over an hour and I'll probably I'll release them both in the same day not to be like, okay well let's get, you know, downloads on this day and this day. But just so that I feel like they'll listen to the first part of it one time and then the second part more than one time. But this is the question that although when I read that document we talked about it they said that the College of Pharmacy you went to is very irrelevant. You know, they're picking you on other issues so where you are on US News and World Report is quite irrelevant. However, Naplex scores have gone down quite a bit and I didn't realize this until just a couple days ago. I'd never actually bothered to look at it but the, and I've got the acronym right now MPJE, the Multi-State Pharmacy Jurisprudence Exam. Scores are all over the place and I feel like because residencies are all over the place, when going from one state to another it's harder to unlearn something than it necessarily would have been just to learn it if you'd never been, you know, tainted with your whole mistake. So how do you instill confidence in this group because I think they're going to use the pickaway soon that pharmacy curricular outcomes assessment to give a score to you as you're going through school and that'll happen the next couple years maybe. But how can you give them confidence? Let's say your college has an 80-85 % pass rate on the Naplex which is about average. How can you give them confidence that, you know, 45 days in, you're not going to have a bad conversation like, well they let me take it again in another month and a half so if you guys don't mend staffing and covering me now that'd be cool. You know, how can we better ourselves for the Naplex and MPJE? You know, what I recommend is take them as early as you can in the early. And that's setting yourself up during your fourth year because, you know, in a lot of states you have to get a fingerprint, you know, and the Board of Pharmacy only meets once a month or whatever like that. And it just takes sometimes 45-60 days to schedule a test. Like I with the earliest I could have taken the Naplex I think was June or July. I think July and so just making sure all of your duck's in a row. At the first month of residency you're not on a hard, most of the time you're doing like an orientation where you learn the computer system and, you know, kind of the workflow and everything. So you, if you can ever afford to like really crunch study for the Naplex or the MPJE, now is the time to do it. I really really encourage you trying to get it done as early as possible. Otherwise it's, you know, depending on where you go the first few rotations it's going to be a challenge and that you're, I don't know I don't have a great answer. I mean you just will have to find a way to fit it in, you know, I use tools, RX prep, you know, for MBJE. Well, TLDR has a nice little cheat sheet that we've made to help streamline your MPJE studying that you kind of fill out. We don't need to go into detail with it now but use the tools that you have that might save you time and then really try to take it early and prepare, you know, you're going to have, you graduate in May, early May and you don't start residency until July. Use that time, I know you're tired. Yeah. And now you want to rest up for residency but study. Get as much done while you have the time to do it because it's only going to get worse and around future you will thank you to be there now. Okay, yeah, I've talked to I guess the take on my one and two, take from that and we'll talk about the MPJE in a different podcast episode. But I've heard people blow it off as, you know, kind of irrelevant it's just the law, it'll be fine. And the failures that I hear are not by a lot of points you still lose a game by one point. Yeah. You still fail the MPJE by one point. I passed it by one point so I never hear anybody going oh, I crushed it. I was emailed today by someone, by someone that failed it twice by one point. He had a 74 both times. Oh my gosh. And I'm like, yeah it breaks my heart, you know, I got to. Right? Okay we'll talk about that another time. All right well, Brandon thanks for being on the Pharmacy Leaders Podcast  and we'll definitely have you back for the MPJE as people are studying for that. Alright thanks, Tony. Hey, what up? This is Brandon Dyson from TLDRpharmacy.com. Why am I interrupting you in the middle this excellent podcast? Because as soon as you're finished with it I want you to come to my website obviously at TLDRpharmacy.com you'll find a whole boatload of free clinical guides and cheat sheets. They'll save you hours of time and they'll make learning pharmacy easy, and also our guides are fun whether you're a student or a practicing pharmacist you'll enjoy reading them, I promise. Checkout TLDRpharmacy.com and get better at pharmacy.

Brandon Dyson returns with a two part series on Residency Interview Questions. He is the founder of  www.tldrpharmacy.com - which provides cheat sheets and easy to understand overviews of dense clinical topics. He is a clinical pharmacist for an academic medical center in Austin, Texas and an Assistant Professor of pharmacology for the online nurse practitioner program at the Georgetown University School of Nursing. He graduated from Howard University College of Pharmacy and completed a PGY1 practice residency at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC. He is board certified in pharmacotherapy. He can be reached at brandon@tldrpharmacy.com In this show we first talk about the dos and don'ts of the pharmacy interview, then in Part II it's game on for a mock interview. Will he get the residency? Okay, okay, he got a residency at Georgetown, so he's qualified.  He’ll trade you one email address on his website for an: Antibiotic Cheat Sheet Residency/Job Interview Evaluation Form Chapter 1 of the book, Pharmacy School: The Missing Manual Full Transcript: Male speaker: Welcome to the Pharmacy Leaders Podcast, with your host, Tony Guerra. The Pharmacy Leaders Podcast is a member of the Pharmacy Podcast Network. With interviews and advice on building your professional network, brand, and a purposeful second income from students, residents, and innovative professionals. Tony: Welcome to the Pharmacy Leaders Podcast. Brandon Dyson from TLDR pharmacy has been nice enough to talk to me over the next two shows and we're going to talk about residency interviews. Now the first thing we're going to talk about is some best practices, some ideas that we had about residency interviews and do's and don'ts and then the second episode is going to be me asking questions as if I was an interviewer and he is an interviewee. Not only just answering the question, but also the logic behind the question.  So again, I hope you enjoy this two-part series.  So, first Brandon tell us a little bit about yourself. What you have in terms of the materials that can help us and then we'll go through some sample questions.  Brandon: All right, absolutely. So first off there is tldrpharmacy.com where I wrote that whole website is the thing that I wish existed when I was in pharmacy school and so that goes through clinical stuff, but it is also pertinent to what we're talking about tonight goes through residency stuff. Namely how to get into residency how to survive the residency once you get in it. All important things and then how to you know get a job afterwards, all important stuff.  So, there's several multiple free articles that you can read to help prep yourself for interviews for the showcase which is passed now and then also we have two guides that are relevant. There's Interview Mastery which is a collection of job interview questions that I can almost guarantee you'll get asked a number of them on any residency and really any job interview and there's also Mastering the Match which is sort of here is everything that I know about getting into a residency, how to do it and here's your best way to position yourself. The cool thing is if you s this if you purchase Mastering the Match you actually get Interview Mastery for free along with it, so they're kind of bundled together.  So, anyway we have those there as the sum total of everything that I know on the subject, but we're hoping to give you guys all a lot of that stuff tonight and kind of go through some scenarios and give you some more specific advice as it can pertain to you.  Tony: Okay. So, let's say I get the, I'd say letter in the mail but that doesn't happen, it's a letter in the inbox, right? And I say, "Oh my gosh, yay. I got an interview" and when does that happen? Do all the interview yes and no's come at the same time? Do you get no’s, or do you just get an empty inbox? Is there a deadline, like an 11:59 p.m. where you might get one? Is it like The Voice where you know you can get saved and somebody can push the button and grab you? How does that work?  Brandon: Yes, they find out oh they offered her an interview and so then they can push the button too, no. Basically every residency program has their own timeline. Some will say our cutoff is January 15. Some will say that's very early it's not that like they're gonna say it's this time or it's this time and it's different for everyone when they decide okay this is when we're gonna have invited everyone to an interview. There isn't a, at least not that I'm aware of, a formal you have to have you know cut off by this time or whatever or made all of your invites by this time.  That being said I also don't think -- so you can get emails at any given time basically. You're gonna start getting them invites for interviews mid to late January and on through middle of February and remember the match happens mid-March. So certainly, by mid-February I think is a reasonably decent cutoff for when you're gonna have found out if you're going to have an interview and you may have even had an interview at that point and I would like to think that most if not all programs will let you know if you didn't interview, if only because you're going to start bothering them. Your like, "Hey, I applied".  It's a very -- what you would expect from a denial, "Hey we really appreciate your interest. Unfortunately, we've decided that even though you're a very qualified kid" you know it's the same kind of corporate speak.  Tony: The pain is real, and it doesn't soften the blow. Brandon: It hurts. I received it too and it does not feel good. Tony: Let's talk about some of the practical aspects of this. So, the average person applies to eight to ten and you would think oh great maybe I get ten interviews that would be fantastic, but maybe that would be actually disastrous. How does a fourth-year student afford to go jet-setting in the middle of their appe rotations around the country? Brandon: So, be very careful with that. Thank you for bringing that up Tony. Let's say you get ten interviews. One, congrats. That's your baller, kudos to you. In some ways it's a good problem to have but especially if you've clustered them all over or if you've got them spread out all over the country that's a flight and if you don't know someone where you can crash on a couch, it's a hotel. Residency interviews are five to eight hours long in some cases, so it's not like you can just like fly in really quick do a quick interview have some coffee and be on your way back home. You're gonna be wasted at the end of it, it's grueling.  So, you have to keep cost in mind and make sure you can afford that, like really price it and you obviously it's not a good idea to just try to max out your student loan. You don't want to borrow money at six and a half percent to pay for all of this. So, do kind of keep that in mind. Tony: Okay. Let’s say I do get an interview. I've gotten my first-class seat on Southwest Airlines, I'm in the front row ready to get moving. I carried everything on to make sure that I don't lose luggage. I get off the plane. Is there somebody there to greet me?  Brandon: I really don't know. You won't be greeted until the lobby, the morning of the interview, and it'll either be by probably the residency director or most likely the current residence will meet you there and a lot of programs will have them buy you coffee or tea or whatever and try to soften you up a little bit so to speak, but don't forget the interview has started. It’s like, "Oh we're gonna get coffee and we're just gonna chat". No, you're interviewing at that point in time, so don't forget that. Tony: We won't tell, what happens at the coffee stay at the coffee. The real interview is later, but just tell me how do you get along with people?  Brandon: Right. Can you tell me about a time where you had a bad experience with a coworker?  Tony: So, before we get into the specific questions let's talk about that day. So, I've landed, let's say that the interviews maybe start later in the morning. Either I got in really early or I got in the night before which might be a little bit better, but I've gone, and I've met with them. What does it look like to go through the interview process from beginning of day to end? I know it's exhausting, especially doing multiples, especially with the appe's and A-P-P-Es and trying to balance all of that stuff.  You're already homeless as a fourth-year student, so it's the homeless person just sitting around trying to find an Airbnb or trying to find a friend. What's that day look like? Can we break it into parts in some way? Brandon: Yes, absolutely. So, it probably starts in the hospital between eight and nine o'clock, so early. I definitely recommend getting in the night before. Make sure you sleep as much as you can beforehand because it's a long day and try to eat a little breakfast if you can and make sure you have a water bottle because you have no idea. The day might change throughout the day. But to break it in parts. You go there you're typically going to have coffee. It's totally fine they're going to offer to buy you coffee, it's not uncouth to accept it or whatever, go for it man, take that coffee. If they offer a muffin and you feel like a muffin go for it too. Absolutely go nuts. So, you're gonna have that and a lot of times that will be with the current residents or whoever it's with and they're just gonna talk to you, get to know you, maybe they give you a quick tour of the hospital, it all depends and tell you about the program. Remember that once you've gotten invited to the interview, that's step one, and at this point in the game you're qualified for the residency. So, the fact that you even got invited to the interview you're in the running and it's now a personality based thing. It's making sure your personality fits with the program more so than on paper they've already decided that you're a fit. Now it's just how do you mesh with the program. So really, I can't stress enough to be yourself, don't try to be what you think the program wants you to be, be yourself and be an honest evaluation of the program as well.  So, you'll have that initial part. You'll typically then if you haven't already met with the residency director and they'll give you through the institution and outs what the program is. Here are the required rotations, here's yada-yada-yada. At various points throughout the day you can expect to do a clinical case where you go through -- they'll typically on paper here's a sample case, we want you to give you our thoughts on it.  You already probably know this going in, but you can expect to give a 15 ish minute presentation on some clinical topic and you can expect to be subjected to a battering-ram of interview questions from the residency director, current residents, every clinical preceptor, the operations manager, the director and like name at any one that you might talk to throughout the year is a potential interviewee. It maybe even just a, I say just a, but a tech or a staff pharmacist because they really are treating this like a job interview for someone that you are going to be working very closely with these people many hours throughout the whole next year. Tony: That presentation though, I just want to stop you right there. So, I was at ASHP, I saw 3,000 of those poster tubes, like you're carrying them around and I think there was even like a poster tube rest station where you could rest the poster tubes and if you would trust the people there. That presentation, are you bringing around like a stick or USB are you presenting from memory are you bringing handouts? Do you really bring your poster and pin it up on the wall like what does that look like? Brandon: I love the poster parking, say it's like a stroller station. Tony: It is. It's right next to the massage station. They had six massage therapists working around the clock at ASHP and it just happened to be next to the showcase next to the stroller parking or poster parking, but tell me about this presentation. I think that's kind of a little bit, I guess it's fuzzy for me. Brandon: So, the presentation, I doubt you're gonna be bringing a poster or anything you're gonna have probably emailed it to the residency director PowerPoint slides unless they asked some other format. I recommend printing out a few copies ahead of time unless they specifically say, "No don't worry about it" and you can ask that in an email, that's totally fine. No matter what even if the resident residency director is like, "Ah don't worry about a flash drive or whatever or stick you know we've got it" bring a stick, please, and email it to yourself too. Have as many safety nets as you can because stuff can and will go wrong and I'll pick on the VA here, but if you're presenting at the VA you can't just put any flash drive into one of their laptops, your flash drive isn't gonna work, it's like Fort Knox. Tony: I didn't know that. My wife works for the VA, but I didn't even think about something like that. Brandon: Yes. It's like it's secure lockdown. Even like, "Oh it's cool it’s on this flash drive" nope. So, stuff can and will go wrong. Your presentation may get moved like, "Oh we were going to have you present at 11:30 but now we're gonna have you present at 12:30" stuff like that can happen. So just have as many safety nets like I said as you can. Email it to yourself email it to the residence director have it on a flash drive and unless they say not to bring a couple of printouts just in case. Tony: What does the room look like? I'm picturing warm leather chairs, coffee pot in the corner, there's a little mini fridge with waters for you, lab coats all around. Everybody's got time off to spend and just hang out with you. Nobody's getting up and interrupting you. Nobody's coming in late. It's just they're all there to see you. Brandon: Yes, that's exactly -- no. Nailed it.  This is happening, those are typical times, let’s say 11:30. This is happening during people's lunches. People are going to shuffle in and out. Most programs are going to assign. So, like you preceptor you preceptor you resident you preceptor are going to watch this presentation, like they'll assign like a certain number so that they have enough people, enough eyes on your presentation to evaluate you and then anyone else that can come in will. But like at my institution, I'll get a sign, you're going to see this presentation and this presentation at a minimum and then if you can make the other ones cool. So, you're guaranteed some and sometimes they'll try to pick it out. I do oncology so if someone has the has the gall to do an oncology presentation they'll definitely be like, "Brandon's going to go to this presentation" they'll do stuff like that just so that you can get peppered with questions. That's the real answer. Tony: We'll talk about the questions a little, bit later but can you give us a little bit of caution in terms of trying to impress with this presentation. Brandon: Yes, remember it's 15 minutes and so you have to be able to do something that's digestible in about 15 minutes. I've seen people come in and try to do diabetes or the chest guidelines God forbid and it's like you can't do that, you just can't. You're presenting to an -- it's not going to work. You’re in a little conference room in the hospital typically, you get 15, you can't cover something that diverse. So, pick something much smaller. Instead of the chest guidelines if you have to do anticoagulant do the use of noags, there is prophylaxis in cancer patients.  You can pick a much much much narrower topic where you're dealing with only a handful of studies at best and saying here's this or you can do a clinical case review, "Hey here's this neat patient I saw on an appe rotation that had whatever. I saw a really good one once on hyperthyroidism where they ended up doing X Y -- or no sorry, was hypo in myxedema coma and she went through the whole clinical case and how it related to guidelines and where we differed from guidelines and where we didn't and why this. It was very well done, and you can do something like that in 15 minutes to where it's informative for the people and you're not skipping 90% of the guidelines. So, make sure it's digestible. Tony: How do you handle disinterest? I don't mean that they don't care it's just maybe you are the sixteenth of the sixteen they invited, and they are glazing over. I'm not saying they were disinterested in your presentation, but how do you not take their energy and kind of bring your energy? Brandon: I'm one of the most boring people alive, so I'm sure they were disinterested. Tony: You still got a residency. Brandon: Yes. Touché. It's in your presentation. It's their 16th time, but unless you've got 16 interviews it's not your 16th time. This is your thing, your subject, and you don't have to be an expert world-class presenter, but we still have very little to go by from you. So, your presentation is a big part of your on-site evaluation. Your enthusiasm, your correctness in the print. If you're giving a presentation that you've had time to prepare you had better be an expert in it. You better know it backwards and forwards and know every single study you included. So, you have got to just be mindful of that. Look at people, don't mumble, really don't mumble, and tape yourself, practice in a mirror, and really watch your um's ah's mm and your awkward pauses that you don't realize you do because you do them I promise. I just did it right there. I do it to, I need to practice better. Oh my God, now I'm like self-conscious about it. But be mindful. Tony: And he's not doing this on purpose, it just happened. It's a Toastmasters thing. We would ring a bell every time you did an um and after a while you're just like, "All right this Pavlov dog thing. We just gotta stop" and eventually you just breathe and remember to breathe and all of that stuff.  But take us from that presentation. So now we've we've given a presentation, we've been around the hospital a little bit. What's that afternoon like? What makes it five hours or eight hours? That just sounds miserable. Brandon: It is. So, there's a lunch, you get a lunch that's nice. You're still interviewing, so be careful. Obviously again they're going to buy you lunch, most programs buy you lunch. Start ringing a bell, now I'm self-conscious about it. So, most programs will buy you lunch. So just be mindful, don't get sloppy spaghetti. Just do like you are wearing your best professional suit and a tie and everything. So, don't do something that's gonna be awkward to eat while you're while you're still interviewing because you are still talking. So, kind of keep that in mind. I was not hungry even a little bit, so I just forced myself to eat what I could when I interviewed because I was a lot of nerves. So, there's that.  There's still the clinical case where they're going to give you a case and they want you to walk through a treatment plan for it, so there's that. There are just multiple rounds of interviews with preceptors, like I said, with direct anyone that might have hands-on with you. Tony: Can we be more specific about how we approach an interview if we know who the person is? For example, residency director walks in, do you treat the residency director any different than you would a pharmacy technician a staff pharmacist or GGY1? Brandon: I really don't think so, no. I think depending on the question, you kind of like butter up to the residency director and talk down to a tech. That is not like- Tony: Bad judge -- you have chosen poorly. Brandon: You chose very poorly. So, you don't want to do that. To me, again, on the interview you've already won on paper. You've already been from a pool of 80 or a hundred people down to 15 or so that get interviewed, so you've already made a huge cut. It's just your personality and the questions that they're asking you on these things are standard job interview questions. So, no matter who's asking there's not a way to game the system. If it's a resident, "I'm gonna really do this thing that I think she wants to hear" there's no real way to do that. It's just giving an honest kind of thoughtful answer. That's what we're looking for. Tony: Okay. Well let's talk about these specific questions, I think it'd be good to go through them now. You have 30 questions, we're not going to go through that many. Neither of us needs a residency, we're just trying to help here. Brandon: This is for the listeners. Tony: Yes, but let me kind of frame the way that it's set up. It's color coded general job performance related questions pharmacy specific questions professional growth-related questions and personality related questions. So, before we get into the weeds I want to know if you can go over exactly what that means each time. So, what is a general job performance related question? Brandon: So, a general job performance related question, to give you a little preface I've been a hiring manager before, not for pharmacists specifically, but I was a hiring manager for Walgreens. I was a store manager or an executive assistant store manager there before getting into pharmacy school and I've done it before that as well.  They're the same exact questions. The same questions that if you go to an Applebee's and apply for a hostess they will ask you questions like this because they're questions about how you interact with other co-workers. How do you interact? Are you a problem solver or a self-motivator? Do you get along well with others? What happens if you disagree with the co-worker or with a customer/patient in our field. The premise behind the questions is identical no matter what field you're on and they're asked in any field and their intent is to figure out how you performed in some past situation using that as a proxy for how you might perform in a future situation. Tony: Okay, so a pharmacy specific question or these pharmacotherapy, what does that mean? Brandon: They are going be closer. So, you might get asked about a clinical intervention you made. You might get asked about rotations that you've had or what you think is a good clinical pharmacist versus a bad one. So, they're not about you specifically reciting drug knowledge per se, even the clinical interview or the clinical intervention you may have made. It's not about the actual intervention you made, it's how you approached, I don't want to say correcting a doctor, but how you approach bringing up a recommendation or a suggestion. How did you integrate with the medical patient care team to improve patient care?  It's not about, "Oh well you can't, you should streamline antibiotics because he's been afebrile for 40". It's not about that. Most of these end up being interpersonal relations even across all four of the kinds of categories that we've made in interview mastery. Whether pharmacy specific or job performance related almost all of them are under the umbrella of interpersonal relations. Tony: So, what is a professional growth-related question then? Brandon: So, the idea there is where do you see yourself? Is residency an end game for you just so that you can get a staff inpatient pharmacist job and sit there for the next thirty years or do you want to go specialize in something? What do you think about the pharmacy profession as a whole, like not even just outside of you but where do you see the profession going? We've started doing vaccinations immunizations in the last ten years. We're starting to see collaborative practice agreements. Techs are starting to get increased span of responsibilities. We're getting mild prescribing rights for birth control and things like that in some states. So where do you see that going? So, asking you stuff like that.  Tony: Then the last group is the personality related questions. I've actually read that students will like or dislike a teacher within the first 30 seconds of the entire semester. Brandon: Ouch. Tony: I know right? It happened near where you are down in Charlottesville. I think it was out of the University of Virginia that they did this study, but basically nothing the professor did changed. So, the authenticity, who they were, it was so apparent so quickly that these people kind of latched on to it. So, what is a personality related question as it relates to residency? Brandon: A lot of it honestly is just they want to know what you do for fun and maybe how you handle stress because you're gonna be dealing with a lot of stress as a resident. So, if your answer is like, "Oh I'd like to go out and get really drunk" that is not a good answer. What  it's what they want to see is do you have a support system that you can cope with. So, it like what do you for fun? It's also just to get to know. Again, you're going to be spending 50 60 hours a week for an entire year with these people, so it's like. "Oh, you play guitar that's cool, so does my son or so do I" "Oh I love that movie too. You like that book?" it's like literally they're going to be your co-workers and compadres. So, there's really not a way to game those questions at all, just be you, and go through and say, "Oh well I do this here's my hobbies" again don't showcase that you like to go get really drunk when you're stressed obviously. Maybe don't showcase all of your hobbies if they're bad, but kind of go through and that's what they're looking for, who are you as a person. Ignore the field of pharmacy, pharmacies just a little slice of your life. Do you have family? Do you have kids? They're just looking at everything. Tony: Well let's actually address that and then we'll go into the actual questions. In terms of when you go to an interview there are things that you are allowed to ask and there are things that are not allowed to ask. So, let’s say I have and I'm not trying to catch you, I'm just saying- Brandon: Got you. Tony: I'm calling someone while we're talking. So, let's pretend that instead of applying for residency when I did with no kids with a new wife, instead I am applying with three six-year-old daughters and I'm not sure how this is going to impact them. I'm just kind of feeling my way through and things like that. What are they allowed to ask and what are they not? Is it covered in the same way that it was covered when you were EXA at Walgreens? Brandon: Yes, absolutely it was. It's illegal to ask that question, I mean as it pertains to hiring. You can't base a hiring decision based on if you plan on having children or if you currently have children or anything like that or even if you're getting married. So, stuff like that can naturally come up and just to ease fear so you don't have to feel secretive, one of my good friends is a resident this year he has four kids. He did it. I know someone else that went on maternity leave during residency, she did fine and got where she needed to be. I know someone else at Georgetown in fact, she got married during residency. Nuts crazy crazy lady, crazy people. In my at least limited experience admittedly I have not seen it affect whether you get a residency or not.  I was saying not specifically those questions, I'm glad you pointed that out Tony. Those personality related questions are really just to get to know more about you. Tony: The reason I ask is because I also worked for Walgreens as a pharmacist, but I was part of admissions and they just over and over again made so clear you cannot ask this. They never said ask this ask this ask this, I mean we did and a lot of times they would try to script questions, but it sounded that way and it didn't really work. So that's the end of part one and next episode we're going to have part two where we'll have a back and forth, a mock interview as if Brandon was coming in as a potential resident and I as either a residency director or someone interviewing him. I think you'll get quite a bit out of it. Brandon: Hi, what up. This is Brandon Dyson from tldrpharmacy.com. Why am i interrupting you in the middle of this excellent podcast because as soon as you're finished with it I want you to come to my website, obviously. At tldrpharmacy.com you'll find a whole boatload of free clinical guides and cheat sheets. They'll save you hours of time and they'll make learning pharmacy easy. Also, our guides are fun whether you're a student or a practicing pharmacist you'll enjoy reading them, I promise. Check out tldrpharmacy.com and get better at pharmacy. 

Brandon Dyson, PharmD is the founder of the pharmacy education website, tl;dr pharmacy ( https://www.tldrpharmacy.com ). He has practice experience in both the inpatient and outpatient settings, with well-rounded experiences in oncology,anticoagulation, and Infectious disease. Currently he is the pharmacy manager of a 50-chair outpatient oncology infusion center. He is board certified in oncology and pharmacotherapy. He has several years of experience in teaching a graduate-level online pharmacology course to nurse practitioners. Brandon graduated from Howard University College of Pharmacy.

This week's RPD (Residency Program Director) interview is with Dr. Dev Chatterji, PharmD, BCPS, a Clinical Specialist in Infectious Disease/Internal Medicine. He completed his PGY1 Pharmacy Residency at Georgetown University Hospital and graduated from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill pharmacy school. We discuss the ins and outs of applying to and succeeding in a residency. You can find more information about his team here: https://www.inova.org/education/pharmacy/inova-fairfax-pharmacy-residency/clinical-preceptors  Don't forget to check out Brandon Dyson's and I's 100 Strong Residency Questions, Answers, and Rationales: https://www.amazon.com/Residency-Interview-Questions-Answers-Rationales/dp/B07M9S91MB/    

Ashlee from Rx Ashlee & host of the Rx Buzz Podcast interviews fellow entrepreneur Brandon Dyson with "tldr pharmacy” about the entrepreneurial spirit and drive to succeed from your passion.  The entrepreneurial drive is a characteristic that flourishes within us. Entrepreneurial tendencies thrive in those who can seemingly build something great from nothing. These are the people who will continue to push themselves to their very limits to accomplish the largest of goals. Brandon Dyson, PharmD, BCOP, BCPS   Works as a Clinical Pharmacist and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor. Completed a PGY1 Pharmacy Residency at a major academic hospital.  He can be reached at brandon@tldrpharmacy.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode, we are joined by Dr. Brandon Dyson, PharmD, BCPS. Brandon is an oncology specialist at an infusion clinic and the co-founder of tl;dr pharmacy. He joins us to share some tips and oncology clinical pearls for non-oncology professionals. E-mail Brandon at brandon@tldrpharmacy.com Read his oncology article at the link below: https://www.tldrpharmacy.com/content/the-ultimate-guide-to-oncology-pharmacy-for-the-non-oncologist or visit https://www.tldrpharmacy.com for a full list of articles. If you have any questions, reach out to us on any of the following: Mike - mcorvino@corconsultrx.com Cole - cswanson@corconsultrx.com Instagram and other social media platforms - @corconsultrx This podcast reviews current evidence-based medicine and pharmacy treatment options. This podcast is intended to be used for educational purposes only and is intended for healthcare professionals and students. This podcast is not for patients and not intended as advice or treatment.

On this episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, Tim Church, YFP team member, interviews Brandon Dyson, co-founder of TL;DR Pharmacy, for another edition for the side hustle series. TL;DR Pharmacy is a website that simplifies dense clinical topics and provides resources to help student pharmacists, residents, and new practitioners. Mentioned on the Show YFP Giveaway YFP Facebook Group The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea by Bob Burg and John David Mann YFP Blog: Money Talks: The Cost of the Pharmacy Residency Quest TL;DR Pharmacy Mastering the Match: How to Secure a Pharmacy Residency Pharmacy School: The Missing Manual E-Book Alex Barker, The Happy PharmD 100 Strong Residency Interview Questions, Answers, and Rationales by Brandon Dyson and Tony Guerra Discover Your Talent Podcast with Tony Guerra 7 Figure Pharmacist by Tim Church and Tim Ulbrich APhA The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success by Darren Hardy Contact Brandon Dyson    

Pharmacy Future Leaders Guest: Brandon Dyson Founder of TLDRpharmacy.com Welcome to the Pharmacy Podcast Network, I'm your cohost Tony Guerra for the PharmacyFutureLeaders podcast broadcasting from the Des Moines Health and Public Services Building at DMACC's Ankeny Campus Connect with me via messenger on Facebook at TonyPharmD1 or you can find over 1200 pharmacy videos at TonyPharmD on YouTube or my website memorizingpharmacology.com Brandon Dyson founded www.tldrpharmacy.com - which provides cheat sheets and easy to understand overviews of dense clinical topics. He is a clinical pharmacist for an academic medical center in Austin, Texas and an Assistant Professor of pharmacology for the online nurse practitioner program at the Georgetown University School of Nursing. He graduated from Howard University College of Pharmacy and completed a PGY1 practice residency at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC. He is board certified in pharmacotherapy. He can be reached at brandon@tldrpharmacy.com In this show we talk about his experiences going to school and opportunities in downtown Washington DC, moving to Austin, taking on jobs in oncology, a discipline he didn't necessarily know much about and generally being open to the openings pharmacy life gives you. I'm excited to talk again with a former Marylander who had a chance to work and now teaches part time at an elite Washington University, Georgetown in a graduate nursing program. Also, we talk about his very helpful website TLDRpharmacy.com. He'll trade you one email address for an: Antibiotic Cheat Sheet Residency/Job Interview Evaluation Form Chapter 1 of our book, Pharmacy School: The Missing Manual I was introduced to the site by an APPE student who found it useful. I think you'll enjoy this conversation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pharmacy Future Leaders Guest: Brandon Dyson Founder of TLDRpharmacy.com Welcome to the Pharmacy Podcast Network, I'm your cohost Tony Guerra for the PharmacyFutureLeaders podcast broadcasting from the Des Moines Health and Public Services Building at DMACC's Ankeny Campus Connect with me via messenger on Facebook at TonyPharmD1 or you can find over 1200 pharmacy videos at TonyPharmD on YouTube or my website memorizingpharmacology.com Brandon Dyson founded www.tldrpharmacy.com - which provides cheat sheets and easy to understand overviews of dense clinical topics. He is a clinical pharmacist for an academic medical center in Austin, Texas and an Assistant Professor of pharmacology for the online nurse practitioner program at the Georgetown University School of Nursing. He graduated from Howard University College of Pharmacy and completed a PGY1 practice residency at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC. He is board certified in pharmacotherapy. He can be reached at brandon@tldrpharmacy.com In this show we talk about his experiences going to school and opportunities in downtown Washington DC, moving to Austin, taking on jobs in oncology, a discipline he didn't necessarily know much about and generally being open to the openings pharmacy life gives you. I'm excited to talk again with a former Marylander who had a chance to work and now teaches part time at an elite Washington University, Georgetown in a graduate nursing program. Also, we talk about his very helpful website TLDRpharmacy.com. He'll trade you one email address for an: Antibiotic Cheat Sheet Residency/Job Interview Evaluation Form Chapter 1 of our book, Pharmacy School: The Missing Manual I was introduced to the site by an APPE student who found it useful. I think you'll enjoy this conversation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pharmacy Future Leaders Guest: Brandon Dyson Founder of TLDRpharmacy.com Welcome to the Pharmacy Podcast Network, I’m your cohost Tony Guerra for the PharmacyFutureLeaders podcast broadcasting from the Des Moines Health and Public Services Building at DMACC’s Ankeny Campus Connect with me via messenger on Facebook at TonyPharmD1 or you can find over 1200 pharmacy videos at TonyPharmD on YouTube or my website memorizingpharmacology.com Brandon Dyson founded www.tldrpharmacy.com - which provides cheat sheets and easy to understand overviews of