Hi, I'm Michelle Korpela

Hello MPhA readers!  My name is Michelle Korpela and I will be spending the next five weeks on rotation here with Julie Johnson.  To tell you a little about myself, I am originally from Stillwater, MN.  I am currently a fourth year pharmacy student at the U and have pharmacy experience in both community and home infusion pharmacy.

This rotation is considered one of my electives, but I wasn’t sure what exactly I would be doing with my time here.  I’d talked with former students who all seemed to have diverse experiences with MPhA, depending on what time of year they had this rotation.  Now that the elections are over (almost…if you don’t count the new Supreme Court case to see who will be governor), it looks like I will be spending the majority of my time preparing for the upcoming legislative session starting early next year. 

I don’t know about everyone else, but I was grateful for November 3, when I would finally be able to get a break from all the campaign ads!!  Well, all that work those candidates put in just to be elected will seem like nothing once they get started on the real work.  We went to a breakfast meeting at the Town and Country Club in St. Paul to meet with some of the newly elected members of the legislature.  If all our meetings involve breakfast, I think I will really like this rotation!  I even got to have breakfast with my local House member, Carol McFarland, from White Bear!  Anyone who says they can’t approach their representatives about issues just hasn’t tried to talk to them.  They are real people from your neighborhood who are actually interested in what you have to say.

The thing that surprised me most during this meeting was how young these people were!  I guess I expected a bunch of old men smoking cigars in a formal parlor, but was pleasantly surprised to see they were pretty normal.  We listened as the newly elected Speaker of the House, Kurt Zellers, and Senate Majority Leader, Amy Koch, talked about their plans for this next year.  It should be pretty interesting to see how the new system with about 35% fewer committees affects the passage of new legislation.  

Later in the week, we met with the MPhA Public Affairs Committee to get an update from our lobbyist.  It’s interesting to hear from someone who knows these people pretty well and can figure out where pharmacy might stand on their radar.  It looks like it should be an interesting year coming up for the pharmacy world.  We think our issues are pretty important, but it sounds like the legislature will be focusing all of their energy on creating jobs and helping the economy make a comeback.  I just hope pharmacists can come together to show them that some of these proposed changes will be necessary to KEEP pharmacists’ jobs!