Pursuing Excellence in Your Academic Journey

Abstract

An academic career affords us the opportunity for continuous learning and professional growth throughout the ups and downs of our professional life, during good and bad times. A key element necessary to navigate an academic career is to always focus on excellence as the core principle underlying our actions and interactions with others along the journey. This Commentary reflects on four essential elements of excellence that can enhance our academic journey. We should always care more, risk more, dream more, and expect more than others think is possible as we approach the days and years of our academic careers.

No one navigates their academic journey alone. The advantage of being a pharmacy educator is the opportunity to engage with others within the Academy of pharmacy educators. An academy is defined as either where individuals pursue study or training in a special field, or a group of distinguished scholars or scientists that aims to promote and maintain the standards in their particular field. ¹ The Academy of pharmacy educators is certainly a dedicated group of faculty and staff members. Furthermore, we have also benefited individually from our many mentors, colleagues, and friends who have given generously of their time to guide us in our personal journey from student to newly minted academician, through advancement in the academic ranks, and through leadership and administrative opportunities. Along our academic journey, we travel and develop life-long friendships with our faculty colleagues, staff colleagues, residents, and post-doctoral fellows. The greatest advantage of any academic journey is that one can learn from individuals at their home institution and from those they know in professional organizations and societies. Even with this ever-increasing opportunity to learn, no one can ever accurately predict the route their academic journey will take. Everyone will experience ups and downs in their academic career. However, if your suitcase is packed with intellectual curiosity, combined with a passion for learning, kindness, respect, enthusiasm, and gratitude, the journey will be amazing and exciting.

Our lives, both personal and professional, have truly been transformed in some way or other by this COVID-19 experience. We have all grown and learned from our individual and collective experiences since that time. We should all take great pride in the collective efforts of pharmacy students, alumni, preceptors, and faculty and staff members who stepped up without being asked to contribute to the wide array of public health initiatives that have been implemented in individual communities. Furthermore, we, as an Academy, need to recognize the dedication that faculty and staff members demonstrated when transitioning to online learning, thereby ensuring the continued education of future pharmacists in our schools and colleges. These times have most definitely been challenging for our pharmacy Academy, but also in this period we have brightly shown what pharmacists and pharmacy educators can offer through our integrity, commitment, and resilience.

The COVID-19 pandemic will likely not be the end of the challenging times we experience during our academic careers. It is during these challenging times when we learn the most about ourselves. A critical lesson that must be shared with other colleagues and students is that it does not matter how often you fall, the key is to always get back up and move forward to assist other individuals, organizations, and yourself toward excellence. Our individual and collective experiences must always be focused on excellence. This focus on excellence is best demonstrated through the words of Ronnie Oldham, business leader and entrepreneur, “Excellence is the result of caring more than others think is wise, risking more than others think is safe, dreaming more than others think is practical, and expecting more than others think is possible.” ²

As pharmacy educators, we can use these words as a strong framework to highlight why it is so critical to instill in our students, residents, colleagues, and friends the passion and drive towards excellence. In striving for excellence, we must first demonstrate caring more than others think is wise. All of us have benefited from the colleagues in our lives who taught us the significance of caring for those we teach, guide, and mentor. We care for others by listening, questioning, guiding, teaching, celebrating, advising, and learning. Often this caring seems risky, beyond what is generally considered wise because it requires us to be vulnerable. Caring as a pharmacy educator and leader requires us to move beyond our comfort zone and be vulnerable to others, but in doing this we show our courage and conviction towards excellence. In Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, she reminds us that vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, and creativity. ³ It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path. ³ Caring and its key component vulnerability are the first essential components towards achieving our goal of excellence.

Second, to achieve excellence, we must be willing to risk more than others may think is safe. Risking more means that we are willing to reframe our thinking, and more importantly, take a leadership role in moving new ideas forward that may be initially uncomfortable to us and to others. Pharmacy educators are bestowed with wonderful opportunities to investigate, explore, and learn about new knowledge, skills, and concepts in the biomedical, pharmaceutical, clinical, and social-administrative sciences. While in our classrooms, laboratories, clinical practice sites, professional meetings, and even the most mundane committee meetings, we have an opportunity to make a difference with our knowledge and experiences to advance new and innovative ideas or challenge existing ideas and paradigms in pharmacy education and research. We potentially squander these opportunities when we are risk aversive to promoting and discussing new ideas because we and/or others believe it is not a safe pathway.

Risking more involves the commitment to assume leadership roles in our schools and colleges of pharmacy when the time is right for you and your career. Your leadership can be demonstrated at all levels, from being an informed and active committee or task force member, to serving as a department chair, dean, or beyond. Pharmacy education and practice will continue to need innovative, creative thinking individuals who are willing to care and risk as leaders. Leading involves our commitment to excellence, our willingness to make tough decisions to achieve excellence, and our willingness to accept the risk that comes with challenging those resistant to the new ideas and changes needed to move towards excellence.

Pharmacy and pharmacy education will continue to have challenges in the nature, scope, requirements, and expectations for what is needed for success. These challenges will only be solved when each of us are willing to take the risk in being open to new ideas and expect more in what we achieve in our quest for excellence. We need to focus our efforts on educating future pharmacists about what they can do with their knowledge and skill sets rather than the specific roles and places they will work. We need to inspire our students to be creative, innovative, and willing to take risks. It is our students and mentees, with our mentoring and guidance, who will assume the reigns to advance pharmacy and pharmacy education.

The third element in our quest for excellence is dreaming more than others think is practical. You might wonder why dreaming beyond what is practical is related to excellence. Simply put: our dreaming is about the ability to visualize something that does not exist but has possibility. All of us have dreams about achieving our goals for our personal and professional life and what we believe this will look like. We need to reflect on how we have achieved our goals and how we are working toward our future goals. Striving for professional excellence involves living our passions each day.

The fourth element in our drive for excellence is expecting more than others think is possible. I have always believed that we need to demonstrate daily to others our dedication and commitment as educators and mentors. What does it look like to be an educator and mentor that does more than others think is possible? We can gain great insight into this topic through the lessons in Ken Bain’s 2004 book What the Best College Teachers Do. ⁴ Bain discusses six broad questions that we should consider as college teachers and mentors. Three of the six broad areas relate to expecting more than others think is possible. Specifically, the best college teachers treat teaching as a serious academic endeavor, they expect more from their students, with a focus on the type of thinking and acting that will be expected for life, and they share their own intellectual curiosity and journey, thus trying to instill in students the gravity of stimulating their own intellectual curiosity and being reflective in their life experiences. Successfully striving for these three requires time and dedication that exceeds what many others think is possible.

What is needed then if you are expecting and doing more than others think is possible? Spencer Johnson’s 2014 book Peaks and Valleys: Making Good and Bad Times Work for You, provides a useful approach, suggesting that each of us need to have “sensible vision.” ⁵ Sensible vision is imagining yourself enjoying your better future in such specific, believable detail that soon you will be enjoying what it takes to get there. Once you have developed your sensible vision, you will soon be doing more than what others believed was possible. As educators and mentors, we need to share our sensible vision with each other, and more importantly, take the time to instill in our students how essential it is for one to define their own sensible vision and work towards that vision framed with the goal of excellence.

In summary, I believe that one of the reasons many of us chose an academic pharmacy career was the potential to make a difference by teaching and mentoring others in their journey towards excellence as they become the next great generation of pharmacists, scientists, and academicians. All of us can remember a time when working with a student who was struggling and suddenly they understood and their learning became internalized. Parker Palmer’s 1998 book, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, summarizes this experience: “I am a teacher at heart and there are moments in the classroom where I can hardly hold the joy. When my students and I discover uncharted territory to explore, when the pathway out of a thicket opens before us, when our experience is illuminated by the lightning-life of the mind—then teaching is the finest work I know.” ⁶ This sentence embodies the entire spectrum of the joy of being an educator focusing on excellence. We start by caring more for our students. We are willing to risk more because of our passion to enable student success. In addition, we focus on inspiring our students to dream more so that they can envision their success. Finally, we are always expecting more of our students as we enhance their foundation to think critically and innovatively.

Excellence must be our individual and collective mantra as pharmacy educators. The great coach Vince Lombardi summed it up well by saying, “The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.” It is only as you strive towards your personal commitment to excellence that your quality of life will meet your greatest expectations.