Jeff Chin: Going the Extra Mile

Winter 2009

When Porter Pharmacist Jeff Chin heard that Mandy Firnhaber had suffered a traumatic brain injury as the result of an automobile accident just before the Thanksgiving holiday in 2005, he offered to help in whatever way he could.

"Mandy was a pharmacy student at Purdue and did an eight-week rotation at Porter just two months before the accident. She was on her way to another rotation when she was in the accident. She was very bright, very personable," Mr. Chin recalls. "Everyone who got to know her really liked Mandy."

While she was undergoing rehab, Mr. Chin offered to help tutor Mandy to help her with her grueling senior year studies. "I just went once a week. At the beginning, I just talked to her about pharmacy. Mandy had suffered a traumatic brain injury and I just wanted to get her as acclimated as I could to the study of pharmacy again. She had been through five-and-a-half years of pharmacy study. She was just six months from graduation when she was involved in the accident. In 2008, she was able to graduate from Purdue."

"Jeff did all of this very quietly. He was not trying to get any attention for himself," he says. "We heard about it from Purdue. Jeff spent time with Mandy for two hours once a week fro 18 months. He really enjoyed doing it. It is just part of who he is."