Helping People Comes First
Van Cathy Pham grew up with certain parental expectations that were very clear to her: If she went into a career in the health sciences, her parents would surely be thrilled. However, among barriers to this was a large one: Cathy didn’t really care much for school. “I always said to people, ‘It would take the jaws of life to get me back to school!’” says Cathy. “The path my parents wanted for me didn’t necessarily appeal to me. What appealed to me was helping people.”
BACK TO SCHOOL
After some time in the corporate world, Cathy found herself a bit burned out, so the “jaws of life” got a hold of her and dropped her back in school – for a philosophy degree. Cathy learned a lot, but found job prospects scarce, so she pivoted to environmental science, where her desire to help people and make the world a better place found expression in work she did abroad for water resourcing. She also found time to teach herself to code software. Something was still missing, however, and Cathy was finding it harder to ignore the simple fact that her devotion to helping people really would be powerfully achieved in a career in health sciences.
When Cathy’s sister graduated from pharmacy school, Cathy was exposed to a profession that seemed perfectly designed to combine all the highlights of her atypical career path, where a strong business background could be merged with face-to-face interactions with patients every day, and where she could use her knowledge of coding to write software to improve practices and methods.
FINDING WAYS TO SERVE AT MBKU
So now Cathy is studying at MBKU’s College of Pharmacy, and she couldn’t be happier. Not only has her desire to serve others found a home at MBKU, so has her relationship with going to school. “MBKU offered a high-touch, personalized experience in learning, which is really important for someone like me to succeed. From the beginning, I’ve felt comfortable knowing professors on a personal basis, which has been vital in my success in their classes,” she says.
Cathy has already taken advantage of MBKU’s culture of service in
a major way, helping to organize the participation of the University’s faculty and student body in multiple COVID-19 vaccine events. After years in the corporate world, and then experiencing the bureaucracy surrounding her work in water resourcing, it was thrilling for Cathy to see how quickly a good idea to serve the community was encouraged and then mobilized. “At MBKU, they said, ‘If you jump, we’ll jump with you,’” she says. “So it was amazing to go to Dr. Monica Trivedi with this idea and to have her support it right away, and then for her and I to make it happen.”