Dr. Molly Miller is the youngest pharmacist in the Infectious Disease Unit (ID) for Internal Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC). UNMC's infectious disease unit has been fighting against COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, and Miller has been on the frontline all along; however, that is not what Miller expected when she first applied. Miller matched for the residency in the ID unit before the pandemic began but was chosen to join the team full-time when the residency concluded.
Inside the ID unit, Miller says “Everything is changing all the time”. With new variants comes new drugs and procedures, along with new discoveries and therapies. On a daily basis, Miller works with both inpatients and outpatients. She consults with inpatients to optimize therapy to discharge them as quickly as possible. While Miller loves working with inpatients, she says burnout is easy with the added stress of COVID-19. She says, “Sometimes it feels like running a marathon at a sprint pace, and I’ve never been good at cardio”. She hopes to see a day where she can work with patients and on projects that do not involve COVID-19.
Miller grew up on a farm in small-town Nebraska and went on to attend UNL. While being actively involved on campus, including playing club softball and being in a sorority, she earned a perfect GPA in her undergraduate career. That perfectionism carried on to pharmacy school at UNMC. She is only the ninth person to ever earn a perfect GPA at UNMC’s pharmacy school. “Achieving a perfect GPA was stressful,” Miller says, “I was just trying to learn all the material that I could and the grades just happened.” Miller admitted that it was extremely stressful to continually do so well in school, but her commitment led her to be hired onto a world-class ID team right out of residency.
Miller’s story is a great inspiration for any small-town students hoping to achieve goals at a big university. Miller’s advice for these students is to “Work hard. Do your best. If you do, you will be successful!”