Author: Laura Ruby

Abeer Aamir, third year Pharmacy MPharm student, tells us more about her experience so far of studying here.

You can read about how Abeer won the this year’s David Kearney Award from the British Pharmaceutical Students’ Association (BPSA) here.

What made you choose Brighton and your course?

I’ll start with the course part first. Pharmacy has always kind of been at the forefront of my career focus, and that is entirely because of my parents. They’ve had the biggest influence even before I was born.

My dad worked in the pharmaceutical sales industry specialising in dermatology. So literally my entire childhood was me helping him study his materials and things like that, or listening to his presentations that he would be giving to doctors and pharmacists. So that exposed me to the whole world of clinical medicine for the first time.

And then on the other side my mother worked in a hospital – as a medical lab technologist, I believe. But she studied as a microbiologist, so she also helped cultivate that interest and that love for science. I remember on one of my birthdays, she got out an old microscope and she had all her old pathology slides to show me and stuff like that.

So, they’ve always fostered that love for healthcare and the sciences and trying to find the clinical aspect of everything. And then when I was in high school, I decided to just dip my toe into pharmacy, to see if I liked it or not. I volunteered at a pharmacy near me, at a major chain back in Canada [Abeer is from Toronto]. And they loved me enough that they hired me! So, I ended up working there for three years.

So, it’s safe to say that I absolutely adored the profession as well. So that just deepened my love for pharmacy.

And the one thing that I noticed when I was there was that I always wanted to make patients the forefront of what I was doing and how I was learning. So, Brighton ended up being my choice to study because it offers such a unique perspective in the way that the course is delivered.