Get to Know Alpha Zeta Chapter!
School: St. Louis College of Pharmacy
LKS Award: 2016 Regional Chapter of the Year Award (Midwestern)
Alpha Zeta Chapter was installed on May 13, 1951, and Alpha Zeta Alumni Chapter was installed at the 1972 Annual Convention. As of Fall 2016, our chapter consisted of 129 active members. We are very proud that many of our alumni members have had a national presence within LKS by serving on Grand Council (including Grand President!) and as Region Supervisors. Alpha Zeta has hosted the Annual Convention in 1972, 1996 and 2015.
What is your best fundraising event?
Our best fundraising event is the annual Mr. STLCOP male beauty pageant featuring pre-pharmacy P3s. We’ve hosted this event for two years and have raised over $800 for Project HOPE each time. The men of STLCOP love to participate, while other students enjoy coming to a fun event. We’ve been able to share this fundraising idea with other chapters (such as Alpha Iota) and help them successfully implement it on their campuses.
What has been your most successful professional event?
We host professional events that are open to the whole campus as well as events that are for LKS members only. Our most successful campus-wide professional event is typically a “Lunch and Learn” session, where we provide lunch and have a speaker talk about a topic that relates to pharmacy. We typically plan the event to recognize Hygeia Day and have the topic address the LKS Women’s Health Initiative issue.
As far as our LKS-only professional events, our workshop-type sessions are the most successful. Our most recent workshops dealt with interviewing tips (with Alpha Zeta alum and GVP for Development Nicole Lombardo serving as speaker) and creating CVs (with Alpha Zeta alum and faculty advisor Sara Richter serving as speaker). Our sisters enjoyed and benefited from these workshops. Plus, it gave us an opportunity to interact with our alumni members.
How does your chapter meet the Core Values of LKS?
Integrity
Integrity is something that holds all the other Core Values together for our chapter. It allows our sisters to work together to become better than any of us could be individually, and it is the key to our chapter’s successes. Our members depict integrity through their actions on and off campus and in how we treat one another.
Leadership
Our chapter cultivates leadership within all of our members. We have 17 elected positions and 2 appointed committee chairs, as well as various different committees that non-officer members can get involved in (such as planning events). Our Sisterhood Chair and President also plan an annual retreat where our sisters come together and participate in a team-building activity and then brainstorm ideas, events and goals for the upcoming year. We also highly encourage our sisters to get involved in organizations outside of LKS.
Scholarship
Sisters of Alpha Zeta come together to help each other academically. We keep a list of members who are willing to tutor in different subjects, and we are all always willing to help one another. Also, our Academic Chair books study rooms throughout the semester so that sisters have a quiet place to study together. Additionally, we love to celebrate the successes of our sisters!
Service
Over the past several years, our various Service and Professional Chairs have worked hard to give our chapter more occasions for community and professional outreach. One great opportunity that we have is to volunteer at a free healthcare clinic one Saturday of the month. Activities include counseling patients on their medications and flu shots. In the past, we were even able to conduct bone density screenings. Additionally, our Service Chair organizes one event per month where our sisters can volunteer. These events mainly include local 5Ks, awareness month events and craft/snack nights at Hope Lodge (a local home where patients receiving cancer treatments can stay rather than staying at a hotel).
Sisterhood
Our chapter hosts at least one sisterhood event per month. These events are usually off campus to allow sisters to get a break from the stress of school and to enjoy each other’s company. We’ve had craft nights, gone line-dancing, attended spring formal, gone laser tagging, held holiday parties and hosted sisterhood retreats.