SCOPS-2008

There's more to it than just a student conference

 What is a student Conference?

 The concept of a student conference is somehow vague to some people- especially to older people who are not currently students and hadn't had such conferences when they went to college- and may be the reason behind that vagueness is that student conferences are both new and different. It's hard to picture students teaching other students. Especially that, in some cases, the teaching students are even younger than the ones being taught.

But the idea is a lot simpler than that. It's all about exchanging information and opinions. Moderators, who are the teaching students and who also represent the Academic Committee, carry out extensive research with the help and supervision of their college professors and teaching assistants- of course the conference is supported by the dean and the supervising professors- and then moderators pass over the information and the experience they had acquired to their fellow students. It's smart because people of similar age groups can understand each other better, they belong to the same generation and they're influenced with the same social and global conditions.

 That's what SCOPS is about; it's about students teaching other students through workshop sessions that are held once a week for about eight weeks or more before the days of the conference. But the teaching process itself needs organizing. And that's where the idea of Organization Committees came from. The conference needs funding for a start, which is provided by the Fund Raising and the Project Development Committees and then it would need people who organize the workshops' sessions and do the paper work, which is how the need for the Co-ordination committee came along. And there's also the need for Editorial Newsletter members to write the Newsletter, Public Relations members to attract participants and a Human Resources committee to be responsible for employment, recruitment and events. The one thing all the Organization Committee members have in common is that they're there to help Moderators and Participants and to ensure that the conference takes place and becomes a success.

 Why is SCOPS any different?

 A lot of student conferences are held every year, but SCOPS stands out. For one thing, SCOPS is one of the few conferences that discuss material related to the Academic study of students. It's held by pharmacy students and it discusses pharmacy in its four workshops: Clinical Pharmacy, Flacons (which is about Pharmaceutical Marketing), Green Pharmacy and Genetic Pharmacy. Not to mention that participants share in a diversity of interesting activities.

And for another thing, SCOPS receives a relatively better support, financial and other, than most of the other conferences, which is explained by the fact that SCOPS' sponsors are pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical- unlike other conferences that solely depend on general sponsors. Pharmaceutical companies and hospitals also provide a different type of support like: training sessions for participants, and important Guest speakers for workshops. For instance, 57357 Hospital allowed Clinical and Genetic Pharmacy participants to train in their sophisticated pharmacokinetics labs, a privilege and an amazing opportunity that a lot of post-graduate students couldn't get. Participants also had the chance to do other visits to places like Sekem and to carry out campaigns at El-Shams club and El Demerdash Hospital.

That kind of help is outstanding and shows how much SCOPS is appreciated as a conference that takes itself seriously and prepares its participants to a tough world of fierce competition when they graduate.

May Mamdouh

A proud SCOPSee