Sometimes, parents just know. Lauren (Miller) Buenger’s mom knew that her daughter was good with people and detail oriented, and she thought Lauren would make a perfect Pharmacy major. Buenger’s father knew, after visiting schools, that she favored Butler.

“It was the only place I asked for a shirt,” she said.

Ultimately, Buenger, who initially wanted to major in Chemistry, knew too. Today, she is a Clinical Pharmacist in the Emergency Department at Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health in Indianapolis. There, she works with physicians and nurses, making recommendations about which drug therapy would be best for a patient or how to best administer the doses.

“I also get to talk to patients and families and council them about their medications and answer their questions,” she said. “And then, because I work in the Emergency Department, if there’s an emergency situation, I’m in the room with the team, trying to get medications for the patient as fast and safely as possible.”

Buenger said that when she started in Butler’s College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, the only pharmacists she knew about worked in grocery stores. “I didn’t realize all the different things you could do as a pharmacist,” she said. Through classes, rotations, and job shadowing, she learned.

While in school, she did two rotations at Riley Hospital and, as her PharmD project, interviewed patients about their medication allergies to find the rates of true allergies versus symptoms reported as allergies.

She also made time to play flute and piccolo in marching band and basketball band, and served as President of Kappa Kappa Psi, the band fraternity, where she met her future husband, Eric Buenger ’12.

After graduation, she did a general pharmacy residency through IU Health, a pediatric second-year residency at Riley, and a year at Cook Children’s hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. She and Eric moved back to Indiana so she could take the position at Riley.

She credits Butler with preparing her well.

“Part of how I was able to meet people and be prepared to get a competitive residency like at IU Health was because of my training at Butler and the rotations that I had,” she said. “That set up the chain of events that led me to this position.”