When her experience in one particular computer science class showed her the field wasn’t a good fit, Jeneen Wilson Garbe searched for a major that would allow her to blend her love of technology with other skills. She landed on information management, graduating with her BS in 1990, and would later blend her technology skills with another field: the pharmaceutical industry.
Garbe was employed at WordPerfect for three years following her graduation. She then became a stay-at-home parent for several years and raised four children. (One of her children, Ryan Garbe, is a current MAcc student at BYU Marriott.) When her youngest child was old enough to go to school, Garbe considered her options for full-time work outside her home. She saw an advertisement that piqued her interest: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was seeking service missionaries, particularly individuals with experience in engineering and healthcare. “My husband is an engineer, and I felt like that was in a way calling me to be a pharmacist,” Garbe says.
She enrolled in the doctor of pharmacy program at Creighton University, where a distance-learning model allowed her to take classes online with a few weeks of on-campus work each semester. Garbe recognized that her undergraduate education was an asset for her both during her doctoral program and after. “There’s a lot of new technology involved in the pharmaceutical industry,” she says. “I think that having my background in information management, where I was used to the technology and used to working with new things, helped me because technology wasn’t scary. Even now as a pharmacist, I can work at a lot of different stores that use a lot of different software for their processes, and I pick it up pretty quickly.”
After graduating with her PharmD in 2011, Garbe worked for insurance company Centene’s health insurance sector as a clinical pharmacist, for Kroger as a pharmacy manager, and for another small independent chain as a relief pharmacist. In her current position as a pharmacist at Medicine Shoppe Pharmacy, an independent community pharmacy, Garbe is responsible for managing medication therapy for Medicare patients, dispensing medications and counseling patients on their proper use, and supervising technicians and interns.
Some say laughter is the best medicine, but for Garbe, community involvement has long been her best preventative care and an important part of her life. “Service has always been something that I try to do,” she says. She previously volunteered as a tutor at local schools and taught first aid and CPR courses with the Red Cross. When she and her husband, Don, moved to Ottawa, Kansas, in 2019, she continued to volunteer her time as an indexer for BillionGraves. A certified black belt in karate, Garbe likes to stay active, run half-marathons, bike, travel, read, and quilt. She and her husband have two grandchildren.
Garbe continues to enjoy her work as a pharmacist for many reasons, including the opportunities it presents her to help others. “It’s like any other job—it can be boring on occasion,” Garbe says. “But every once in a while, you get those interactions where you can help somebody out. You notice the way that they’re taking their medication isn’t correct, and you can make it better. Or you can simplify something in their regimen that will improve their lives. Or even just talking to them. I’ve had so many experiences where I’ve just talked to people about the medicine, and they said, ‘Nobody has ever explained that to me before.’ Those are the gratifying moments of being a pharmacist.”
