Did university open days leave you with more questions than answers on what studying might be like?

Making that choice of which course and university can often trouble young people who are unsure of their future, but pharmacy student and lifestyle vlogger Phedra Dee has been showing young people exactly what studying pharmacy is like through YouTube. 

Dee is about to start her fourth and final year of the Pharmacy MPharm degree at King’s College London (KCL), but has been producing vlogs about her life since early 2020 which she says combine her “passion for pharmacy and content creation”. 

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“I wanted to study a degree that had pharmacology, medicinal chemistry, and also had patient interaction, healthcare and the NHS, so pharmacy was at the perfect degree that included all of those things,” she says. 

“Even though I'm not always speaking about pharmacy and it's just general student lifestyle, it's opened up people's eyes a bit more to studying it or look into it a bit more”, Dee adds. 

"You're seeing how I'm living through it"

Dee has nearly 90,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, and the fifty or so videos posted so far have had a combined total of more than 2.5 million views.  

She says when she started her GP placement, the receptionist recognised her as “her daughter loves my vlogs”. 

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But whether it’s working in her room, at the library, doing tasks on placements, or talking about what exam she’s stressing about, Dee’s content captures ‘a day in the life’ of a pharmacy student, and she isn’t afraid of showing the reality of what hard work looks like. 

“I think what I do is quite different, as I'm not just sitting there and speaking about pharmacy, you're seeing how I'm living through it. You’re seeing my struggles, my highs, see me integrating it into my life, but seeing just how worthy a profession it is,” says Dee. 

Dee’s found her Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) to be one of the most challenging times at university, as well as adapting to becoming the “first independent prescribing year” when she graduates. 

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But she “loves” seeing her lecturers’ passion, which helps her to absorb what she’s learning and guides her “family, friends, and even my subscribers” to resources when they ask her questions related to pharmacy. 

"Heartwarming" response from young people

Viewers include people aged fifteen to eighteen who want to make “an informed decision” on the GCSEs and A Levels, and fellow university students at KCL and further afield at UCL, Bath and Birmingham. 

“I get loads of messages all the time of people saying I’m studying pharmacy because of you. Even in KCL when the first years arrive, they walk up to me and say I probably would have done a completely different degree if it wasn't for your vlogs”, Dee says. 

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She says people didn’t know pharmacy students went out on placements “which was quite crazy” until they saw her videos, or that pharmacists worked in hospitals and GP surgeries too. 

Art, law, and English students like watching her content too as they relate to going “through the same process of university into the real world”, but informing other health degrees has been perhaps most rewarding for Dee. 

“A lot of medicine students who watched me didn't know how important a pharmacist is, so a lot of the interactions with medicine students on YouTube and on campus has been heartwarming because it's like the profession isn't really understood outside of people who study it”, Dee explains. 

Whilst her videos aren’t solely dedicated to pharmacy, Dee has enjoyed unravelling the “enigma” of studying it and says she won’t give up on pharmacy even if her role as a lifestyle influencer grows even further. 

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“I do enjoy influencing, and I've always loved content creation, but as soon as I started this degree, I knew I wanted to continue in it and my goal is to go into GP and then branch into industry. 

“I will not be abandoning the pharmacy profession. I’ll hopefully be able to vlog my pre-reg year and give pharmacy more limelight and let more people learn about it!”