Onward

ONWARD — Friends: Just 2 days shy of a decade, I am departing from Butler University as an associate professor on 7/28/16. Many thanks to my manager, Dr. Koehler and Dean Chase, for taking a chance on me back when academia was never really even in the picture for my career. Thanks to many of YOU as well for your inspiration, teaching, sharing and collaborating with my students over the past as well! I’ve had the tremendous privilege to serve BU (my 1st alma mater) and start many really cool, innovative projects — like:

· build BU Well from the ground up with students,
· mentor 7 different interprofessional student book writing & publishing projects,
· create an award-winning continuing education (CE) department and programming for pharmacists,
· expose healthcare students to entrepreneurs in a new course on entrepreneurship,
· start a one-of-a-kind drug pricing, drug formulary management and HECON APPE rotation,
· found & recruit the one-of-a-kind PAW Fellowship and fellow, and
· innovate other courses by driving policy, advocacy and global health into them.

Over the past year, I’ve also been fortunate enough to work both for Butler and Myers and Stauffer (as my clinical site within pharmacy practice). While I love serving both organizations, my workload at Butler never decreased when I began with Myers last August. While I knew what I was signing up for at the time as a 1.4 FTE (after all, I created this proposal!), what I discovered about myself during this past year is that even I have limits, believe it or not.

In an effort to keep my health (and sanity) intact earlier this summer, I proposed to work closer to full time for Myers and Stauffer (4 days/wk) and work part time for Butler, shedding some, but not all BU responsibilities. Myers and Stauffer graciously accepted this proposal — yay! Unfortunately, my proposal did not work out with BU.

But, in my own failed negotiation lies a gift: one free day each week to explore the NEXT erinalbert-isms I should or could be working on.

So, what should I do with this gift of a day per week moving forward? Of course, I have a million ideas to fill each gift of one day per week, (working on getting the #STEMPrincess project on American Dreams at HSN, writing other books, etc.) but I’m curious what you think! I know I have a brilliant, amazing and creative network of friends with a panoply of great ideas.

I’m going to leave you with a Google form: http://tinyurl.com/OneDay4e for you to tell me what you think I should do on that free day each week.* I’m open and flexible. Maybe you’ve got an idea you think I’d be great at that I never even considered before. (*Of course, always keeping in mind that my one-day gift work could never conflict with my work at Myers and Stauffer.)

Please complete the form if you have ideas, or want to chat about important, passionate work; you all know that as a pharmacist, attorney, entrepreneur, mentor, writer and STEM advocate, I love supporting these professions and causes, as well as many others. I’m learning about podcasting, livestreaming, SQL, training & development, brand building for the #STEMPrincess franchise, coding and writing fiction.

And even though I may be leaving Butler for now, know that they can never, EVER, take the Butler out of the girl! #GoDawgs