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Lauren and Bobby Glaze with their dogs Jeri (left) and Baxter (right). The Glazes brought Baxter home from their pharmacy rotation in Fort Thompson, South Dakota, which had a profound impact on their lives.

‘Life-Changing’ Pharmacy Rotation Inspires Alumni to Create Unique Scholarship

March 4, 2025 | After meeting as pharmacy students and beginning their careers in Kentucky, Lauren Glaze, Pharm.D., and Bobby Glaze, Pharm.D., call Camden, Arkansas, their home. Still, more than a decade after their fourth-year rotations in pharmacy school, a piece of their hearts remains in Fort Thompson, South Dakota.

The experiences the couple had on the Crow Creek Sioux Indian Reservation during their final year of pharmacy school have become a foundational part of their lives. A desire to make those experiences available for any pharmacy student led the Glazes to establish a scholarship with a $25,000 permanent endowment for unique rotations like theirs.

The Lauren & Bobby Glaze Pharmacy Practice Experiences Support Scholarship will provide financial support for students seeking nontraditional experiences or other hands-on internship opportunities while enrolled in the UAMS College of Pharmacy. Some examples of these experiences may include travel or residence outside of a student’s home area, including rural Arkansas and other areas, as well as international or global learning opportunities.

Advanced pharmacy practice experiences (APPE), or rotations, are exclusive to fourth-year pharmacy students as part of their experiential education. Most rotations are in Arkansas, with a select few outside the United States. College of Pharmacy students can choose from options in Taiwan, Thailand and Rome, Italy, for international rotations.

In total, students complete 10 APPEs for their final year of pharmacy school — one rotation each month, with at least 160 hours of work, for 10 months. These include one required rotation each for acute care, ambulatory care, community pharmacy and health-system administration. Other options include four rotations for direct patient care and two electives.

The Glazes, both 2014 College of Pharmacy graduates, met as students and married soon after graduation. They lived in Kentucky briefly until an opportunity for Lauren Glaze, now a clinical assistant professor of pharmacy practice at UAMS, brought them back to Bobby Glaze’s hometown of Camden in 2015. Today, Lauren Glaze practices in Magnolia, while her husband has shifted to banking, using his experience in the industry to help manage loans for independent pharmacies. Together, the couple owns part of Hampton Medical Pharmacy in Hampton.

Once they were established in their careers, the Glazes knew they wanted to help other pharmacy students, but weren’t sure what to do. Then, inspiration struck in an unlikely place.

They were working on their wills — “like good 30-year-olds should,” Lauren Glaze said — and hit on the idea of creating a permanent endowment for a scholarship. That way, instead of waiting until later in life, they could start donating now.

“I knew I wanted to give back, but I couldn’t figure out how,” she said. “I thought about what was a pivotal moment in our pharmacy career? Well, it was getting to do an experience that was not like everything else we were doing.”

“There’s a lot of students out there that probably don’t sign up for these experiences because they know they’re expensive,” Bobby Glaze said. “There’s nothing cheap about going to South Dakota, or Arizona or Rome. Most likely the ones who can’t afford it aren’t going to sign up for it. So our hope was, maybe they get to have an experience, like we did, that’s life-changing.”

The Glazes found inspiration at Fort Thompson, the heart of the Crow Creek reservation. With a population just over 1,200 people, it’s the largest city in South Dakota’s Buffalo County.

Through a partnership between the UAMS College of Pharmacy and the Department of Health & Human Services’ Indian Health Service, the Glazes spent a month with the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe. The couple was deeply affected by their experiences there and carry those lessons forward today in their personal and professional lives.

“I didn’t expect what we saw,” Bobby Glaze said. “The sickest of the sickest people. Stuff we talked about in practice that they said, ‘You’ll never see this in practice’ — but there it was.”

“Everyone had diabetes that was very severe, and did not have the resources to take care of it or understand it,” Lauren Glaze said. “Add in health literacy, cultural differences, access to food, poverty, addiction and substance abuse. It was a terrible cycle.”

“It really opened our eyes to caring for patients beyond what we’re used to seeing every day,” she added. “[Rotations like these] bring perspective and attention to patient populations that you see on a screen, but you can actually put a face to.”

The couple spent a month on the reservation and built lasting relationships with the community. Today they keep up through social media, and they visited again last year.

“Our memories weren’t just on how sick the people were,” Bobby Glaze said. “It’s the people that we met and the culture we encountered, and how awesome it was to get to be a part of that.”

They also took something home with them: a little dog, Baxter, who became a beloved family member for 11 years until his recent passing. The Glazes’ passion project, Native Dog Brewing in Camden, is named in his honor.

“He was the glue that has held us together,” he said. “So we’ve carried a piece of that rotation with us for the past 11 years. We had a daily reminder of how much South Dakota meant to us. It was really a shaping moment for our relationship and our careers.”

The entire experience is something the Glazes want to make available for any pharmacy student.

“We want to make sure that any student, regardless of their income or their background, can experience that,” Lauren Glaze said. “It should not be a financial issue if they want to go.”

To learn more about giving to College of Pharmacy scholarships, visit our Giving page.