Jan. 16, 2026
From Experience
With its emphasis on experiential learning, Pitt's School of Pharmacy helps students channel foundational skills into life-changing care.
TOPICS: Education | School of Pharmacy
Designs on Aging-Ready
By Lindy Kravec
Cole Stevens felt nervous but ready.
It was the fall of 2024, and the Chester County, Pennsylvania, native was just months away from earning a Doctor of Pharmacy following three years of rigorous study and work at the University of Pittsburgh. He wasn’t ready to celebrate yet, however. First, Stevens needed to secure his next career move: a coveted and highly competitive place in a top-tier postgraduate fellowship program.
“The process was very challenging because there are roughly a hundred applicants for every open position,” recalls Stevens. “You have to get really good at networking, showcasing your talents and confidently presenting yourself. The process was very taxing, but the whole time I knew I was ready to take my next step.”
And he was—in more ways than one.
As a doctoral student at Pitt School of Pharmacy, where experiential learning is a core curriculum component, Stevens was being prepared to take on a vast array of challenges.
In addition to his classroom and lab curriculum, he had already spent many hours working with a diverse range of patients and pharmaceutical practices in community and institutional health care settings. His fourth and final year was dedicated to experiential learning in the form of field-based learning rotations. Through these opportunities, he built upon his skills, honed his interests, made professional contacts and gained real-world experience that helped him stand out in the market and on the job.
“The rotations that I did as a student pharmacist were invaluable to helping me feel prepared,” he says. “I had so much more confidence because I had real experience in the field to draw from."
"The rotations that I did as a student pharmacist were invaluable to helping me feel prepared...I had so much more confidence because I had real experience in the field to draw from."
Cole Stevens, PHARM '25
Growth experiences
“We are very passionate about experiential learning because we’ve seen the difference that it makes in our students,” says Susan Skledar, professor of pharmacy and therapeutics and director of experiential learning and continuing professional development, Pitt Pharmacy.
Skledar knows well how on-the-job learning and training alongside skilled preceptors can help transform a student into a professional ready to make a difference on the first day of their career. That is why the Experiential Learning Program comprises approximately one-third of the pharmacy curriculum and is a critical piece of Doctor of Pharmacy program accreditation. At Pitt Pharmacy, experiential learning activities begin within the first weeks of a student’s first year in the program.
It’s all meant to best prepare graduates to thrive within a profession in transition. Pharmacists have emerged as front-line health care providers and integral members of complex, interdisciplinary medical teams. Experts predict that these roles will only grow over the coming years as an aging population meets a decline in primary care physicians, creating a gap in care that well-trained pharmacists will be poised to fill.
Learning and doing
When it came time to decide upon a career, Rebecca Kendsersky had no problem making up her mind. Her mother and brother both graduated from Pitt Pharmacy in 1979 and 2012, respectively. She had been drawn to the work for most of her life and was familiar with the profession. Yet, after her admission to Pitt Pharmacy, Kendsersky realized that she didn’t know what specialty she wanted to pursue.
“One of the great things about the Experiential Learning Program is that you get an incredible amount of exposure to the places you can go with a PharmD,” she says.
The first year of the program is intended to develop students’ core practice skills. That includes enhancing social awarenesses and understanding social determinants of health within a community, encouraging public health through wellness and disease prevention programs, and developing communication skills with patients from diverse populations. Following this, second-year students focus on community pharmacy practice, which involves learning medication dispensing processes for patient safety and developing patient education and counseling skills.
Kendsersky built on that training and more in one of her final-year experiential learning rotations, which took her to a Native American reservation in New Mexico, 1,500 miles away from Pittsburgh.
In Pitt’s program, third-year students are expected to take these kinds of new understandings into a hospital or health-system setting, which is just what Kendsersky did in her rotation at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. The results surprised her.
“I’ll be honest. Working with children was not on my radar at all,” she says. “But when I realized that every medication I touched was helping a child get out of the hospital, then I knew this is where I was meant to be.”
She also learned more about how much she loved working beside colleagues across specialties. Collaborating with nurses, dieticians, parents and even the patients themselves, Kendsersky was able to make a difference beyond medical interventions, even if that just meant approaching every challenge with a smile.
The places you’ll go
“Our graduates are making an impact well beyond what is commonly thought of as a pharmacist,” says Skledar. “Beyond their vital role in direct patient care, they’re contributing to research, international health, government policy, academia and more. We’re very proud of the impact our graduates make in a wide range of career paths.”
The Experiential Learning Program aids in this professional career diversity. The fourth-year focus on advanced pharmacy practice experiences can be tailored to each student’s career goals. The whole year is dedicated to intensive practice of the pharmaceutical care process in patients with increasingly complex pharmacotherapeutic problems. This is also the year where students can select elective rotations in areas of leadership, business, industry, academia, global health and more.
Fourth-year PharmD candidates complete eight five-week rotations spanning from April to May of the next year.
“I was very passionate about working in the university environment, teaching but also working with patients,” says Pitt Pharmacy grad Christian Rosikiewicz. “The University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy allowed me to steer my educational experience toward those passions. That helped me land a role that I love.”
Today, Rosikiewicz is a clinical manager at the Pitt Vaccination and Health Connection Hub, where he connects members of the University community and the general public to clinical services and health-maintenance resources. He says his rotations—like the one he did with Bienestar Pharmacy and Wellness Center in Lindenwold, New Jersey—were not only key to preparing him for the work but also to connecting him with professionals already thriving in the field.
It helps, too, that Pitt Pharmacy partners with more than 800 preceptors in the commonwealth, nationally and internationally to provide required and elective experiences. Through their dedicated efforts, preceptors play a vital role in preparing Pitt’s future pharmacists to become successful practitioners. They are valued colleagues after graduation and are foundational to Pitt Pharmacy’s robust alumni network.
From classroom to clinic and beyond
Watching a Pitt Pharmacy education translate into real-world impact is what it’s all about for Skledar and her team in the Experiential Learning Program. Happily, it’s something they get to see all the time.
No wonder the program is a critical component to what makes Pitt Pharmacy a nationally ranked, top-tier school. With its emphasis on ensuring that graduates are both practice ready and team ready, the school is helping to produce not only collaborative, patient-focused pharmacists ready to make a difference but also those who feel good doing it.