DR. SHARI (ROSEN) SCHWARZWALD,
EMBRACING HER ULTIMATE POPS LIFE
CURRENT POSITION: Infectious Diseases Clinical Pharmacist
LOCATION: San Jose, California
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN DEGREE: Doctor of Pharmacy
GRADUATION YEAR: 2010
ACTIVITIES AT MICHIGAN: Michigan Pops Orchestra, and umm...does going to Bubble Island at midnight and playing DDR at Pinball Pete's count? (EDITOR'S NOTE: Bubble tea counts)
MICHIGAN POPS ORCHESTRA INSTRUMENT: Violin
Listen to one of Shari's favorite Pops pieces while you read about her Pops Life!
A CONVERSATION WITH SHARI
KELLY COMPTON, our Pops Life correspondent, talks with Shari about her life-changing Pops Experience and how it gave her the courage to live her best Pops life.
KC: Shari, tell me a bit about your musical background before coming to Michigan
SS: My grandfather was a lifelong piano player and he started giving me piano lessons when I was 5 years old. In 5th grade my school started offering band and orchestra so of course I wanted to do that too. I remember they brought in some instruments as a demonstration to help us decide what instrument we wanted to play. They had two rooms set up, with string instruments in one room and band instruments in the other. The band room was really crowded and had long lines, so I went into the orchestra room and tried out the violin instead. I had fun, and I wanted to be different than everyone else, so I chose violin and I've never looked back.
In high school, I played in my school's orchestra (strings only), the after-school full orchestra, a couple of quartets, and a little jazz orchestra my teacher tried to start. Once I played in the "pit" for an adaptation of Fame at a local private school. I also gave lessons to some middle schoolers for a while, which I really enjoyed, but I got too busy to do it consistently and had to stop.
KC: What drew you to the Michigan Pops Orchestra once you arrived on campus?
SS: Because music had been such a big part of my life in high school, and I had made most of my close friends through orchestra, I knew I wanted to continue playing in college. I think I first heard about Pops during orientation although I don't remember exactly where. My first semester I joined both Pops and the Campus Symphony Orchestra. By the end of the first semester I had met more people and made more friends through Pops, so I decided to quit CSO and stick with Pops.
KC: Tell me about some of your favorite memories from being a part of Pops!
SS: There are so many great memories! My first two years at Michigan I lived in South Quad, and every Sunday night a few Pops people on my hall used to walk down to Revelli Hall together. I also loved playing with my quartet, which lasted all four years of undergrad. We called ourselves the Middle Initials because for our first concert, we wrote down our names for the program and we all listed our middle initial. The quartet was me, Jen Wurtzel, Sarah Thiel, and a couple different violists (they kept graduating). Jen, Sarah and I all lived in South Quad and so we ended up rehearsing in the South Quad lobby once a wk.
Our friends (and other random people) would sometimes come listen to us practice as they walked in and out of the dorm. We even got comments from the cafeteria workers who would hear us practice as they were setting up for dinner; once, Jen invited one of them to come to the Small Ensembles concert and she actually came! I also had a trio with Albert Chow and Marla Wojciechowski where we mostly played music that Albert composed. Albert also lived in South Quad so we usually rehearsed somewhere in the dorm as well. I remember a lot of late nights hanging out in Albert's room while he was composing...and then getting to play that music a few weeks later, which I thought was really cool.
FOUNDERS OF THE MICHIGAN POPS STRING ORCHESTRA!
EDITOR'S NOTE: Shari & fellow alum Jennifer Wurtzel are too modest, so we are taking a TV timeout to highlight that they co-founded the Michigan Pops String Orchestra! Click on the photo above to view a copy of the first concert program, and also to hear clips of the MPSO in action.
KC: What does your current job entail, and how did you get into this field?
SS: I am currently an Infectious Diseases Clinical Pharmacist at a hospital in San Jose. I always knew I wanted to do something professional and something science-related, and my parents are both pharmacists as well so I had some exposure to the field. I also loved chemistry, so I wanted to incorporate that into my classes as much as possible. When I got to college, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and pharmacy just made sense. I did two years of undergraduate pre-requisites and then got accepted to the pharmacy program at Michigan (which was another 4 years). During my pharmacy school classes, I learned that you could do a pharmacy residency and work in specialized areas, and I also really loved my infectious disease classes.
After I graduated, I did two years of residency in New York City (one year general, one year ID specialty) and then got a job as an ID pharmacist at a hospital in New Jersey. In 2016 I got married and my husband got a job with Google, so we moved to San Jose and I found another job doing essentially the same thing here.
My role as an ID pharmacist is to manage antibiotic use throughout the hospital. The CDC estimates that up to 50% of antibiotic use in hospitals (and possibly more in the community) is unnecessary or inappropriate, and inappropriate antibiotic use can lead to increasing antimicrobial resistance as well as unnecessary side effects.
Many hospitals have developed antibiotic stewardship programs in order to control antibiotic use, reduce resistance rates, educate prescribers and patients, and most importantly to improve patient outcomes as a result. My job is to run the stewardship program, work with the ID physicians to educate our staff, and try to create processes that incentivize prescribers to use fewer antibiotics overall, and more appropriate antibiotics where they are necessary.
KC: What are your favorite/least favorite aspects of your job?
SS: I love my job. Clinical pharmacy is a job where you often get to write your own job description (in my case literally) and focus on the things you want to do. I love feeling that I make a real difference in patient's lives and that I can improve society in one small way by reducing antimicrobial resistance. I also really love working with our pharmacy staff to educate them and help them make better recommendations to physicians. When I was younger I wanted to be a teacher, and I still get a lot of enjoyment out of seeing my pharmacists (and student pharmacists) learn and grow.
KC: What advice would you give to students interested in a similar career path?
SS: I think one thing I didn't really understand when I was a student is that there can be multiple paths toward any one career goal. Pharmacy residencies are very competitive, even more so now than when I graduated, and I was lucky that I was able to take the most direct route for what I wanted to do. However, I now work with a great group of pharmacists who aren't residency-trained, but still have very clinical jobs and do a fantastic job at it. I think as long as you are passionate about what you do, try to keep learning something every day, and keep an open mind for new opportunities, you can have a fulfilling career no matter what you end up doing.
KC: What does the Pops mean to you personally?
SS: Pops was where I met my closest friends, and many of them are still people I still really value in my life. Jen is still my best friend after 14 years, and Albert and I are still very close as well. Sarah and I were roommates for two years, and both of us ended up going to pharmacy school.
My Pops friends encouraged me to put myself out there, take risks, and be adventurous while I was in college. If I hadn't had those experiences, I don't think I would have had the courage or the desire to go out of state for residency, and that was a decision that changed my life. If I hadn't moved to New York City, I would never have had the chance to live in the busiest, most exciting city in the world, and I wouldn't have become as self-sufficient and assertive as I am now. All of my career opportunities, connections, and friendships would have been very different, and I never would have met my husband (whom I met through Jen). I never would have had the chance to play with the New York Reperatory Orchestra in a gorgeous church in Times Square, or seen the NY Philharmonic play in Central Park, or gotten a front row spot to see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I also wouldn't have gotten to work at my first job (at Capital Health in New Jersey), which really shaped who I became professionally. Until a few years ago, I still listed my experience with Michigan Pops and the Small Ensembles groups on my resume, and people seemed to love asking me about it. I definitely think it made me a more interesting candidate and helped me stand out.
SHARI'S FAVORITES
- AUTHOR: Alexandre Dumas - My grandmother gave me The Three Musketeers while I was in middle school and I loved it. I just really like fun adventure stories. Also, The Chosen by Chaim Potok is my other favorite. It's a great story about friendship.
- RESTAURANT IN A2 AND SAN JOSE: Ann Arbor - Does Bubble Island count? I have a LOT of good midnight bubble tea memories. San Jose - I did discover poke when I moved here. It's kind of like deconstructed sushi- a bowl of rice, with fish and various Japanese or Hawaiian toppings on top.
- DINING EXPERIENCE EVER: For my husband's 30th birthday we went to Per Se, which is a super upscale, expensive restaurant in NYC. Their menu is a 9-course tasting menu (plus dessert) in a restaurant overlooking Columbus Circle. The food was fantastic and the service was unlike any restaurant I've ever been to. Every table had their own individual waiter who was happy to explain anything we asked and cater to our every need.
- TRIP WITH FRIENDS: Over New Year's 2009, Jen Wurtzel and I flew to San Francisco and took a road trip down to San Diego over about 3 weeks. I had never been to (most of) California before, and it was a really fun experience. California is a beautiful state with a lot of good food and fun things to do.
- GERM I'D LIKE TO ERADICATE: There's a particularly antibiotic-resistant bacteria abbreviated KPC or CRKP (carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumonia) which is resistant to almost all currently available antibiotics.
- CLASS AT UofM: Hmm...I had a love-hate relationship with the second semester of organic chemistry. It was a REALLY hard class, and I spent basically my entire second semester of freshman year studying for it. But I also really enjoyed the logic of it, and I was so proud of the hard-won A- I got at the end. It was also something of a bonding experience...I think all of us who took that class together were a little traumatized by it.
- POPS PIECE: Oh, there were so many good ones! One that was especially meaningful to me was “It's the End of the World As We Know It” from aPOPScalypse. That was my last concert with Pops, and I just thought it was fitting: it's my last Pops concert, it's the end of the world (and my U-M career), but I'll be okay and I can move on.
2/1/18