LAMP Student Kate Bangert - Pharmacy Technician
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Today we meet LAMP Honors student Kate Bangert, a sophomore studying Media Advertising. Since her freshman year of college, Bangert has worked as a pharmacy technician at Genoa Healthcare, a national, closed-door pharmacy that operates exclusively inside community mental health centers. Bangert works regularly scheduled shifts at Centerstone of Indiana’s Bloomington location and can take on more hours in her “region” – the area between Bloomington, Indianapolis, and West Lafayette, Indiana.
This past year, Bangert has traveled to many other Genoa locations, filling in at pharmacies that were understaffed or completely without typical staff due to COVID. During the fall 2020 semester, she averaged about 16 hours a week at Genoa, while balancing a full course load. “Over winter break, I was working almost full time because there were multiple sites in Indiana that had to completely shut down because the staff had direct exposure to COVID, and their teams would have to quarantine and isolate.”
Bangert and her fellow fill-in staff have to take over and run pharmacy locations they have sometimes never been in before. “There were five stores in a row that I did this for over the course of three and a half weeks,” she noted. While working in distant locations, employees are placed in Genoa-sponsored hotels. Employees are also compensated for food and mileage while traveling, with additional payment for traveling to locations over an hour away. Staff temperatures are taken twice during each shift, and if an employee has to miss work for COVID exposure or a positive test, they are paid for scheduled hours.
Bangert’s father is a pharmacist in the West Lafayette area, so she was aware that pharmacy-technician positions combine flexible schedules and a decent hourly wage. She studied for and passed her certification exams the summer before starting at IU, and became a licensed pharmacy tech at Genoa last December.
While Bangert isn’t directly interested in a career in the pharmaceutical or medical fields, she has learned a lot through her role, including how to work well with coworkers of many different ages, and how to balance her work with her academics. Navigating the additional complexities of the pandemic, Bangert has also gained lots of patient and customer experience. “I could see myself doing marketing or advertising in the healthcare field,” Bangert says.
Thanks to Kate Bangert for talking to us about her role! If you are a current LAMP student with an interesting experience to share, feel free to email us at lamp@indiana.edu.
Feature compiled by LAMP staff Laresa Lund.
