My name is Luisa and I am of this terrible type of person that to introduce myself I need to talk about where and what I do for work. Because, yeah, work is a huge part of my life and identity. But, do not worry, in the end I’ll l give you a little taste of what is left of me besides my professional life. Hope you will not be too bored when you finally get there!

So, I have a degree in pharmacy but do not act as one, but I teach for several “wanna be” pharmacists and really hope I can contribute to their journey. But this is not an easy task.

You, see, I teach Public Health related-subjects to them and they are not very found of it. In the university, I teach and in many others in Brazil, the Pharmacy curriculum was targeted to train students to work in the pharmaceutical industry. And I, talk about health policies, pharmaceutical services, health systems and everything else that seems unimportant to any of them in this context. Furthermore, since I do research on access to medicine issues, I have a very critical view of the pharmaceutical industry role in health systems, and to most of them, to present some data on it is almost like I am destroying their illusion of what it represents.

However, I love teaching. I love figuring out how to catch their attention, how to make my subjects interesting. I love this challenge. I love to change, each semester, over and over again, in order I can improve my classes, tasks, interactions…. and I am constantly doing that over these last 8 years. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn´t – I love the good days, and feel terrible in the bad ones.

I actually feel very privileged to be able to do what I do. I get bored very easily and in my work, despite the difficulties, it only depends on me and my creativity to do things differently. And, actually, this blog is one attempt of doing things differently.

I am not very excited about writing a blog and communication is not something easy to me. I am quite shy in social environments and not very good at social media. I like technology and use it quite a lot in my work, but not to communicate, either in professional or private life. I am known to be someone hard to get in touch to. On top of that, in English! (not my native language).

So, why am I doing this again?

This blog is one tool that can be used to improve online collaborative learning, so I am trying that once again (after a failed attempt years ago). Hopefully, I will regularly write reflections posts talking about my journey towards digital literacy and, honestly, I am quite late on that.

Before I finish, I have to keep up with the promise I´ve made at the beginning of this post and show the other (not so big) part of me. I love going to musical festivals, for me, it is one of theses places that makes me feel really like myself, especially on rock concerts. I also love movies, dogs, and cats, despite being allergic to them. Still, I live with two cats that adopted me years ago and, until now, I have not had any serious health problems. I just tend to sneeze a lot and take, every other day, some allergies medicines. It seems like a fair trade to me.

So, before it goes too long: Welcome to my blog!

Hopefully, we will share some nice moments together as I do with my cats and in rock concerts!

Luisa