Camille Culp is a final-year PharmD candidate at The University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy.
The University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy APhA–ASP Chapter was ecstatic to receive the Chapter Operational Leadership Award at the APhA Annual Meeting & Exposition this past March! We have worked extremely hard to improve and grow our chapter in the past several years. Our two main goals were to increase communication between campuses and increase patient care initiatives.
Fostering trust
Our executive committee got the ball rolling with a team-building exercise at the university’s challenge course. The course takes you through several challenges that require communication, teamwork, and trust. This exercise was a great way for the newly elected executive committees to bond and foster trust as we embarked on our 2-year journey together. It allowed us to learn how best to communicate with each other and depend on each other to meet our goals.
In the past, we have struggled to maintain a solid line of communication between the executive committees on each campus. To solve this problem, we implemented monthly president meetings where the chapter president-elect in Oxford and the chapter president in Jackson met to discuss chapter events and operations for the upcoming month. In addition to these monthly meetings, we held meetings with both executive committees once a semester to provide campus updates and foster time for positions to brainstorm new ideas.
Robust patient care project operation
We also restructured our executive committee to allow patient care chairs to be appointed the spring semester prior to their first year in office. This new structure allowed the chairs to have more autonomy in their roles to increase patient care initiatives as well as provide them with more time to plan for their year. In the past 2 years, we have increased our patient care operations from three to all six of the nationally recognized operations. This was a major goal for our chapter and one that we were excited to accomplish!
Fundraising success
With the growth of our chapter, we focused on increasing fundraising efforts to fund chapter events. Our main annual fundraiser is a raffle and auction event. The executive committee canvases the local business for donations for raffle baskets and asks professors to donate their time for experiences with the students. Auction experiences in the past have been game nights, movie nights at a professor’s home theater, canvas painting, biscuit making, and even a lake day with our dean.
We are fortunate to have great faculty who are willing to donate their time and energy to increasing the student experience at Ole Miss. Other fundraisers our chapter participates in include an annual T-shirt and sweatshirt fundraiser, a bingo night, and selling dot cards to promote networking before annual.
More APhA2025 attendees to celebrate the award
Our chapter has experienced tremendous growth over the past several years, and we are extremely proud of how far we have come. This year we were excited to have increased our attendance at APhA2025 to 55 students. As we were sitting in the student kickoff session, we were listening to the descriptions for the Chapter Operational Leadership Award, and we were all looking around because the description sounded so familiar. We said, “No way, we do these events, too!” When our chapter was announced as the winner of the award, we were all in shock. It truly was the most rewarding experience after all of our hard work, and it was made even sweeter to be able to celebrate with 55 of our chapter members present.
It was a truly inspiring experience, and I am excited to see how our chapter continues to grow.