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When you go on vacation, how do you remember everything you did?
Pictures! Tons of pictures. Pictures of landmarks, people you meet, and of course the food you
eat. If you're a writer, you might take notes in
a journal about the history of a city, a particularly awkward encounter, and again, the food you
eat. When you get home, what do you do with all
your notes and photos? You can throw the pictures in a box or mass
upload them online. You might lock your journal and place it on a shelf somewhere.
But a good vacation is something you want to share with others. So you set out to make
a scrapbook. A scrapbook is an ideal account of your trip,
as it contains both evidence and a retelling through words and captions.
You can share a scrapbook in more than one way, whether prominently displaying it on
your coffee table for guests to peruse at their own leisure or engaging an audience
of interested family with the animated retelling of your adventures.
You can be creative, really customizing the layout, appearance, and content of the scrapbook
to the experience you had. But a good vacation isn't something you just
share once. You go back to it year after year. Tell your grandkids about that time way back
when. The scrapbook helps you remember the details
of the trip, triggering those forgotten memories. So why all this talk about a scrapbook?
You see, like a scrapbook tells the story of your best vacation memories, a portfolio
tells the story of your best work throughout pharmacy school.
Instead of pictures, your evidence is the various projects, assignments, and presentations
you have completed. These are supplemented with reflections that retell the experience
and what you learned. You may get to share your story with an interviewer
face-to-face; or your interviewer may peruse it on his or her own time.
But even if the interviewer never sees your finished portfolio, it won't matter.
You see, through the process of putting together your best work, in other words sifting through
the best photos and reflecting on them in writing, you are subconsciously preparing
to share your story later...whether with a prospective employer, a student you are mentoring,
or heck, even your grandkids some day...
When you go to that tripod-shaped tower in Paris and forget a camera or a notebook, you
get frustrated with yourself. Why shouldn't it be the same with an academic adventure?