I need to know the "Why"

Prior to deciding on pharmacy as a career, I was in a profession that was very personal to me. In 1997 I accepted my first position straight out of undergrad as an agronomist. I grew up in a farming family and the idea of carrying on the tradition was very important to me. I lived in a rural community in central Nebraska with a work truck and an ATV (or 4-wheeler, depending on where you are from). What more could a single 23 year-old man ask for?

Just under a year later I moved to Iowa to be closer to my now wife. I was able to find another agronomist position, this time heading an up-and-coming precision ag division. For those of you under 40 years of age, we didn’t always have computers that fit in our pockets with Google Maps. This was brand new technology that allowed ag equipment to be guided by global positioning systems (GPS). I was working 70-80 hours per week, but it didn’t feel like it.

Roughly nine months after starting the precision ag position my boss called me into his office around 8AM one morning. He informed me that we would be merging with another company and if I wanted to keep my job, I needed to start driving a semi. No other options on the table. After several minutes of fruitless negotiations and me not having a desire to drive a semi, I was out of a job. He handed me a cardboard box and I packed up my desk, just like in the movies.

For one week I did little more than sit at home and contemplate why I was in this position. I knew I needed a job soon, but mergers and acquisitions were running rampant amongst many ag companies. I could find no agronomist jobs within a 2-hour one way drive from my house. Fortunately, the company my wife worked for partnered with a temp agency and they had a position open in the mail room of the company owned pharmacy. I would be packaging and mailing prescriptions to employees and retirees across the US. It was a 9-5 job and paid $15/hr in 2000. I couldn’t afford not to take it.

I continued looking for jobs in agronomy for several months with no success. One day, the pharmacy manager asked me if I was interested in a career in the pharmacy profession. I had never considered it. She was willing to pay for some of my schooling if I continued to work at the pharmacy. $15/hr and getting some of my school paid for, sign me up! No, I was not so cavalier as to not take a deep dive into what the profession had to offer and what the educational requirements were. It seemed like a daunting task, but I was confident I would preserver.

After meeting with the College of Pharmacy counselor, I realized there were several prerequisites I needed as a contingency to being accepted into pharmacy school. One of those classes was calculus. I had avoided calculus like the plague through high school and undergrad. I didn’t understand it, nor did I want to learn it. Unfortunately, it was a must have. The only calculus class available that fit into my time frame was a three-week condensed class during winter break. The secret weapon I had was a wife with an electrical engineering degree who was very fluent in calculus.

Each class was 4 hours per day for 3 weeks straight with an exam each Friday. I would spend every evening scouring through the textbook attempting to learn the subject matter and complete the practice questions. My wife would attempt to explain the formulas and how to calculate them and I would consistently ask “Why?” Why does Sin/Cos=Tan? She would tell me “It just does.” I would again ask, “But why?” The air would fill with uncomfortable tension, our voices would rise, and I would not have been surprised if someone told me smoke was rolling out of my ears. For whatever reason the “It just does” method did not work for me.

I eventually passed that class with a C, one of the hardest classes I have ever taken. I learned a valuable lesson about how I comprehend and retain new information. Knowing the “Why” is how new material clicks and stays with me. Rather than take a shortcut and attempt to memorize new information, I set aside the time and energy to learn the “Why.” I think about this attribute whenever talking with a patient about their healthcare. My preferred approach is to ask each patient how they retain new information best. Do they need to know the “Why” or are they okay with “Because I said so?”