Learner Profile
Samantha Petzer
HMX Courses
Samantha Petzer holds a Bachelor of Pharmacy degree from Rhodes University in South Africa; she took HMX Pharmacology and Immunology while completing her community service training as a hospital pharmacist.
What made you want to study immunology and pharmacology with HMX?
Immunology wasn’t something we had dived into detail on during [my previous study]. Of course we did touch on it, but the HMX course went into such great detail so it really added on to the basics I had gone over during my pharmacy degree. For pharmacology, I wanted to refresh my knowledge and see if it could give me greater insight into what I had previously learned.
How challenging were the courses, given your background?
The pharmacology course, most of the content I had already learnt in my previous study, so it was more kind of a brief review since the last time I studied was two years ago. That was great as a refresher.
Immunology for me was a little more difficult because I hadn’t done it in such depth, but the way the course was actually set up, I found it very helpful to learn new content. I really appreciated the animation videos as well as the tests after each lesson, just that revision of the content that was in the previous module.
What aspects of the courses did you find most helpful for your learning?
I really enjoyed the animation videos, and I know for some of the topics toward the end of the course they did a review animation, and that was really helpful. The tests after each module were also very helpful just to kind of solidify what I had learned.
Some of the videos in the pharmacology course where you are taken into [the operating] theater, I thought that was really an awesome way to put into context how those concepts can be applied in real clinical practice. Although I had previously learned those concepts at school, it was helpful to see how they can be applied.
How did the pharmacology course compare to your previous pharmacy study?
It was actually very similar, I was quite surprised. At the university I went to we were very theoretically based; only in our last year did we really get to the application of what we were learning. The way it was taught in the online videos is, this is what it is, this is why it is, and this is how we can use it. We were only basically taught the why and how toward the end of our [university] course, which made it a bit difficult to understand why A leads to Z, and to understand the necessity of it. It was helpful when it was all structured in one bundle [in HMX Pharmacology].
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