LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — This weekend at the University of Kentucky, thousands of students will hear their name called in commencement ceremonies Friday and Saturday. Each of these students have their own unique story, and one of them is Faith Fursman.
“I'll relax with a puzzle book,” said Fursman. “If you mess up, you need to figure out where everything went wrong.”
Fursman has always loved mind puzzles. The problem-solving mindset has always been a part of her.
“I want to get to the root of something,” she said. “I don't want to sit there and leave a stone unturned. I want to dig around in the dirt and find what the problem is, so we're not just slapping a band-aid over a bullet hole pretty much.”
This problem-solving mindset led her to pursue a career in the medical field.
“Growing up, I liked the medical field,” Fursman said. “I really enjoyed the science and everything behind it.”
“I didn't want to be a doctor, so that's where I discovered the public health side of everything. From there I started, as I got older, recognizing, hey, there's problems in our pharmaceutical industry.”
As part of her education at the University of Kentucky, Fursman got to take part in an internship with the Kentucky Department of Public Health. She shared that internship allowed her to see real-world applications of where she could put her degree to use.
“That gave me an opportunity to not only work on these materials to make a lot of new connections on the state level but to also present that work at the state fair the past two years.”
Fursman graduates from UK this Saturday with a master’s degree from the College of Public Health. She’ll take her problem-solving mindset into the future as she pursues a PhD and a career in pharmacy research.
“We need to see what we can do for the people instead of for the industry,” Fursman said. “In the long term it's what's best for people, and I think we're going to see a lot of that in coming years.”
