Pharmacy Students Heed Lessons from "The Apprentice"

BUFFALO -- A University at Buffalo pharmacy professor is using the hit TV reality show "The Apprentice" -- and its famous "You're fired" endings -- to help his students become more likely to hear the words "You're hired" upon graduation.

"One of the requirements of the course is that my students must watch 'The Apprentice' and extrapolate the business concepts from the show to pharmacy business principles," said Karl Fiebelkorn, associate dean of the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, who teaches "Topics of Pharmacy Management." "Part of their grade is dependent on what they can glean from each episode."

As a result, Fiebelkorn is assured of a rapt audience each week as he begins class with a discussion of the previous week's show. While many of the 46 students taking the course will work in pharmacy clinics and chain pharmacies, "a lot of them will want to start their own consulting business," he said, explaining why he incorporates a popular television program into his teaching.

The series' season premiere provided several marketing and business concepts for discussion, including why executive producer Donald Trump makes cast members participate in such trivial contests as locating his personal helicopter somewhere at the 525-acre Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.

The men's team beat out the women in this first exercise by finding the highest point of the golf course and looking around for the helicopter from there, while the women chose another search method.

"The women got on a golf cart. Have you ever ridden on a golf cart? I can outrun a golf cart. They're not that fast," Fiebelkorn said amid the students' laughter during a recent class.

"Trump does 'stupid' things like that because he wants to find out what your initiative is, what your reasoning is -- can you act fast," he added.

In this case, Trump also awarded the winning team first choice of two Bally Total Fitness locations in New York City to carry out the assignment of designing, marketing and conducting a new "Fitness Plus" class for the gym and raising the most money through sign-ups.

Fiebelkorn quizzed his students on how each team went about accomplishing its objectives.

For example, the men's team marketed its class to current Bally members.

"What's the advantage of doing this?" the professor asked, and students shouted out a variety of answers: "There's already interest" among members, who "are people who want to work out."

Fiebelkorn added, "And it's much easier. You've got their names and addresses, you've got the whole demographics, you know everything about that population."

The women's team marketed outside of its Bally center, using the age-old concept of "expanding your business, which is much harder to do," Fiebelkorn told the class. The team also made a difficult situation worse by using the phrase "Triple XXX" on its flyers, which had near-pornographic connotations, according to the students.

Did Trump make the right decision in firing Melissa, who had argued regularly with her teammates during the process? "Yes," the pharmacy students seemed to agree nearly unanimously.

When asked what the theme of the episode had been, one student answered, "You have to be able to work with people."

Fiebelkorn then transferred that theme to "real world" pharmacies, where "you're going to have to work with a lot of different people," then asked students to imagine themselves doing what Markus, project manager for the men's team, had done during that week's show.

"When you're managing a pharmacy and working as a pharmacist at the counter, are you going to stop and ask others, 'How am I doing?' Do pharmacists do that? Of course not," he said.

The class went on to discuss marketing brand-name products versus generics, delivery costs, income statements, balance sheets -- even embezzling -- for the rest of the period.

"What did I teach you last week, do you remember? Dummy companies and money laundering," Fiebelkorn said, laughing. "My dean will want to hear about that."

Several groups of students from the class hold "Apprentice parties" each week to do their "homework."

One such group, made up of second- and third-year students, said they enjoy the UB course for the valuable business sense it is giving them.

"We're going to come out of our profession with a lot of money and not knowing really how to deal with it," said Michael W. Holowachuk, who watches each week with Amanda L. Johnson, Christina L. Spoonley, Amanda L. Poworoznek and Krystal M. Nieckarz, all second-year students.

The class also provides information of more immediate value.

"It covers subjects that are good to know for your own personal use," according to Nita Keluskar, a third-year Pharm.D. student. "Not only money, but topics such as time management, stress management, how to get along with people."