Alexis Ploutz-Snyder: Being open to change

Second-year PharmD student Alexis Ploutz-Snyder says the only truth in life a person can count on is change. She spent most of her life planning to attend medical school and become a doctor, but by the end of the two gap years she took following her undergraduate education, she was heading to pharmacy school instead. 

As an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, Ploutz-Snyder loved organic chemistry and studied pharmaceutical sciences, thinking it would offer her a unique foundation for medical school. Through her undergraduate program, she had connections with faculty who encouraged her to shadow a clinical pharmacist before swearing off pharmacy to go to medical school. Though she arranged the opportunity to do that, COVID-19 threw a wrench in her plans, diverting her back to the original plan. Instead, she decided to strengthen her medical school application by taking a year or two off to do research and save money. Landing a research coordinator position in pediatric neurology, she quickly excelled in her role and was asked to participate in a phase one clinical trial for a novel epilepsy drug for kids with Dravet Syndrome, a rare form of genetic epilepsy. Children had to come to the operating room and have the drug administered into their spine.

“That was sort of where I found my passion for pharmacy,” Ploutz-Snyder said. “Getting to see that whole process, from the development in the pharmaceutical company all the way through trials and seeing some of the outcomes in real time for these kids, that made me really excited about pharmacy.”

Ploutz-Snyder had already applied for medical school by the time she decided to change course to pharmacy school, but this was “the most passionate [she’d] ever felt about health care.” She applied to what she believed to be the best pharmacy schools in the country and was accepted at all of them. Her final decision was between the University of Minnesota and the PharmD program in her home state of Michigan, where her family and work experience were. 

“Ultimately, what drew me here was our new curriculum, which I'm really excited about… I loved the concept of MNspire,” Ploutz-Snyder said. “I think it's a really great way to learn. I was drawn to how open the faculty were to feedback from students on what was and wasn’t working…I just really like the way [the college] takes feedback and does high-quality research to make changes that are better for the learners, better for the community.”

When Ploutz-Snyder visited the Twin Cities campus for the first time, she said she was met with the type of welcoming, supportive kindness she was searching for in her education. 

“I just found it so easy to connect with the faculty here. Everybody that I talked to was so willing to help me and really wanted to help further my career,” she said. “That was something that drew me here as well— I wanted to learn in an environment where everybody was excited to help their students and that's the energy that I was met with.”

As a career-changer, Ploutz-Snyder found her gap years taught her important lessons. Though school and career development are incredibly important to her, she said being in the workforce helped her learn how to prioritize her health and relationships, offered a real-world perspective on hospital and clinical research settings, and helped her understand the concept of lifelong learning.   

“As a pharmacist, you'll always be learning. School is not the end of your learning. It's meant for you to learn as much as you can, to prepare you to be a good pharmacist, but it's not meant for you to know every single thing when you leave,” Ploutz-Snyder said. “There's always gonna be new drugs that you have to learn about… I think that is a value that I've seen a lot of faculty bring to the curriculum…and that's part of the education— how do you keep learning?”

One of Ploutz-Snyder’s favorite facets of the PharmD program this year has been learning about pharmacology. She finds it empowering to learn in which scenarios to use which medications, to examine labs for contraindications, to come to a decision after looking at a patient case. Research is still central to Ploutz-Snyder’s learning; she’s pursuing a research emphasis alongside her degree and works on epilepsy-related research with Dr. Lisa Coles, associate director of clinical pharmacology and pharmacometrics at the Center for Orphan Drug Research. At her core, Ploutz-Snyder simply wants to improve lives. 

“As much as I’d love to say I want to create the cure to cancer or I'm going to change the world…at baseline, the goal is to help make somebody's life easier or improve their experience with the healthcare system,” she said. “Hopefully for most of the people that I see I can do that for them.”

With her family out of state, Ploutz-Snyder is proud of the supportive community and success she’s found here, which she said reaffirmed her choice to attend the College of Pharmacy for her PharmD. Keeping an open mind about her career has been incredibly valuable, she said. 

“Even though I thought my whole life I was going to be a doctor— you might just run into experiences that totally change your mind and being open to those experiences is huge,” she said. “The only thing you can count on that will always be true in life is that stuff is going to change.”