“It just hit me.”
That’s how Tamea Johnson, a senior at Madison West High School, said she decided on a career in pharmacy last year.
It didn’t come completely out of left field – she said she’s always been an active volunteer and enjoys helping people, and has always enjoyed classes where she gets to be in a laboratory environment. Putting those things together as a pharmacist makes sense, she said.
“I just want to be someone who helps out in my community,” she said. “I want to be able to give people their medicine, know that they’re okay, build relationships with people in my community, (as) someone who helps take care of them.”
Johnson will lean into the career more next month when she attends the Congress of Future Medical Leaders, a two-day virtual event that gathers promising high school students who intend to pursue careers in health care.
According to the event’s website, past speakers have included former Surgeon General Dr. M. Joyce Elders, Nobel Laureate Dr. Mario Capecchi, genetic scientist Dr. George Church and many others.
“I actually didn’t know anything about it until I got the letter in the mail telling me that I’d been nominated by my school,” Johnson said. But she’s excited to network with fellow future healthcare professionals, and learn from established experts.
“I can make connections with these people. I can learn from them. I can see what their lives have been like, what their path was to becoming the leaders that they are now,” she said.
As the name of the event suggests, Johnson isn’t just thinking about being a pharmacist; she’s set her sights on becoming a leader in the field.
“I just want to show Black people and specifically Black girls, that this is something that they can do,” she said. “I want to be someone that they can look up to, someone that they can see and know that this is something that they can also do. Just me personally, I just want to be that person to kind of break barriers, kind of pave a way.”
Less than five percent of pharmacists in the US are Black, according to the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy’s 2019 National Pharmacist Workforce Study. At 4.9 percent, the share of pharmacists who are Black doubled since 2014, when it was just 2.3 percent. Almost 14 percent of the American population is Black.
Johnson has already been accepted to the University of Arizona and Xavier University of Louisiana, and is waiting to hear back from Spelman College. She intends to study chemistry with pre-pharmacy requirements before going on to pharmacy school.
“I’m very excited for this experience,” Johnson said. “I have this thing about me where if I want to do something, I don’t see any reason why I can’t.”
