campus connection
Frightful Fun in the Classroom Zombies? No problem. A course featuring some apocalyptic challenges prepared student pharmacists to face real-world emergency situations. By Joseph A. Cantlupe
There’s the typical pharmacy course where student pharmacists explore lab results, learn about medications and consider patient needs. A course held at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Pharmacy went with a unique approach, which included this outrageous combination of words: Zombie Apocalypse Lab. Yes. They’ve done it. They lived to tell. For two years, the VCU School of Pharmacy has run electives for third-year students in advanced non-sterile compounding with a twist. Enter zombies. Spurred by this bit of horror fantasy, the professors turned a seemingly routine pharmacy course into an edge-of-your-seat experience. That’s because the real world offers those too: natural disasters, floods, power outages. So the professors put a method to the madness by enabling students to prepare pharmaceutical concoctions using the nearest herbs in a lab with no electricity, no running water and only the most antiquated equipment, making the experience as stressful as it could be without the reality of the danger. They pumped
dreary music in the background, installed dark garbage bags to block sunlight and assembled cardboard cutouts of “The Walking Dead.” And yes, a zombie or two walking around with streaks of “blood.” Dr. Lauren Caldas, assistant professor, dreamed up the idea for the elective because she wanted to be innovative and do things a bit differently for the 30 students in the non-sterile compounding course. She recalled saying to her partner, Dr. Abigale T. Matulewicz, also an assistant professor, “Hey, why don’t we do this elective and tie it to Zombie Week?” Both fans of “The Walking Dead,” they jumped on the idea of creating the zombie theme that ran through the course, which allowed students to learn real-life pharmacy skills. The two-week course began with student pharmacists evaluating an herb natural to Virginia that had medical properties that they could develop and ended with a zombie-in-your-face moment where the students had to put together medications in a fake hurry-up scenario to comfort people in pain over tooth ailments, at least in time to flee the clutches of any zombies and get real care.
photo: Danny Tiet/VCU School of Pharmacy
“The beauty of this was how it teaches the same core concepts without having students reliving the actual traumatic event they’ve gone through,” Caldas said. “We have had students who have gone through a lot, these individual harrowing stories coming from war zones and everywhere. It teaches the same impressive skills of problem solving and thinking on your feet in a more relaxed environment. We wanted to elevate the learning environment and encourage the faculty to get out of their silos.”
VCU School of Pharmacy professors transformed a classroom into a zombie apocalypse scenario.
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Academic Pharmacy NOW 2020 Issue 1
