Being a Mum as well as a pharmacy student

By: Nour Morjan

I have been a university student for about 7 years, and this is my eighth. I became a mum while I was in my fourth year at the university. I changed my course twice, from Biotechnology engineering to Genetics and Molecular Biology to finally Pharmacy.

I started my MPharm course being a mum. As much as being a mum is wonderful and is a blessing that doesn’t make the struggle any easier.

Now I’m on my final year, I could say being a student is more than a full-time job for me and being a mum is a 24-hour job.

During my time at the university while being a mum, I lacked the support to help me overcome those difficulties and I had to make it on my own. Although, I had the full support of my husband, we both needed support and help in what we went through.

At the start, I thought it was just me going through all of that. I thought maybe as a mum, I was not capable of raising a child. The doubts took control over me, and I already have had depression and anxiety which was a separate issue for me that affected my life a lot.

There are some students in my course who are parents. As the course progressed, we started sharing the struggle we go through together. We talked about how hard it is to juggle between house work, childcare, cooking and social life which seemed impossible.

I started to think that it wasn’t just me but all of us, students with children, are in the same boat struggling together without knowing anything about each other’s struggle.

A few months went by and then I came across Pharmacy Podcast Network on Instagram and through it I came across the lovely Pharmacist Suzanne Soliman from Chicago, USA. She is the founder of Pharmacist Moms as you already all know. I got inspired by her, so I tried looking online to find something similar in the UK which supports pharmacist mums, but I couldn’t. Instead I found how pharmacists can help new parents and mothers.

I contacted Suzanne and now we are going to work together to start a branch of Pharmacist Moms in the UK.

Very excited.