Over the 2025 summer, Riverside Brookfield High School seniors Soleil Kaciuba and Jane Tselepis participated in a three-week pharmacy technician program with Loyola Medicine and the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) cooperative. They gained experience while shadowing pharmacists and practicing skills in the medical field, as well as accomplishing research and exploring data.
Over the summer internship, Kaciuba and Tselepis participated in labs that helped them plan for their future goals. The program was designed to prepare them for pharmacy technician certification and to learn more about the career path. The internship was advertised around the school far before it took place. This allowed students to find out more about it and explore the opportunity.
“I was walking down the hall one day after school, and I saw a poster on the wall about a pharmacy technician internship, and I thought, ‘Wow, that sounds like a perfect thing to see if this is really for me,’” Tselepis said.
The program was appealing to them and would be helpful for their pursuing future.
“They said you had to work in the hospital, so it was a really good opportunity, and you didn’t really need any past experience,” Kaciuba said.
Before they could participate in the program, however, there was a rigorous application process involved.
“I first had to apply on an interest form that I scanned on that poster I saw,” Tselepis said. “And then she [the program director] called back a group of people for interviews. I had to submit my resumes, a teacher recommendation, and then had an interview with her. Once I got into the program, there were a bunch of forms we had to get signed for Loyola.”
The acceptance rate of the internship was competitive, and Tselepis was appreciative of the chance to participate.
“I’m just super grateful for the experience,” Tselepis said. “It was a super unique opportunity. It was me and nine other people involved, and I was really grateful to be selected.”
The internship taught students important skills in the field of medicine, and they learned a lot about the hospital environment.
“It helped me realize that this is something I really wanted to do,” Tselepis said. “It helped me realize that I know I’m going out the right path, gave me an idea of what I’d want to do in college, and just cleared up some stuff for me.”
Although the internship was targeted towards pharmacists, it wasn’t focused solely on that career.
“I’m really interested in pharmacology and possibly becoming a pharmacist, though I’m more interested in the research development side of medicine,” Kaciuba said.
During the program, students got experience and gained skills that will be useful in their future. They learned about the practices and their type of work.
“I learned what a pharmacist does in a hospital,” Tselepis said. “I learned the different settings you could work in—inpatient, outpatient, in ICUs, in chemotherapy treatment—and really just got to see what the day-to-day of a pharmacist looks like.”
In addition to shadowing pharmacists and learning about their schedules, they got to perform research and explore data through studies.
“Every Wednesday, we would have labs that we would do, and [during] one of them we got to draw up medications in IV bags,” Kaciuba said. “It was really cool to do a hands-on kind of thing.”
During the three weeks, they had a demanding schedule, and the program tested them on the content they were required to memorize.
“The hardest part of the internship was taking a bunch of tests on the curriculum that we were doing on this website, and there was a ton of reading and videos,” Tselepis said. “It was three hours sitting in a room with no windows, just reading words that I didn’t know and had to learn.”
Despite the meticulous training, the internship offered valuable skills and lessons for the rest of their lives.
“I really learned a lot, and I got to learn that pharmacies are not just distribution or how you imagine it in a retail store,” Kaciuba said. “It’s cool to see how the pharmacist interacts with all the different staff in the hospital and really makes a difference.”
