<p>I'm a high school student highly interested in science, specifically chemistry, as a major and career. However, I've heard nothing but gloom about job prospects for pure scientists, and don't want to subject myself to financial misery. But, I don't want to waste my talents in a field where I would essentially be a dispensable cog like business or human relations. It sounds like becoming a pharmacist would be a happy medium ground between practicality/job happiness.</p>
<p>Which leads me to my next question, how would one go about being a pharmacist? Are there specific majors that should be chosen? Are there particular undergrad schools you should go to?</p>
<p>And one more thing, can or do pharmacists get involved with medicinal chemistry (research and development of new drugs) at all? Ideally, I would be a medicinal chemist, but the pay and job prospects don't seem as quality as those of pharmacists.</p>
<p>My understanding, is that pharmacists are not really involved in drug research. If you want to do that (which some would advise against) then you’re probably better off getting a PhD in chemistry or biochemistry.</p>
<p>Pharmacists are basically a check to make sure doctors aren’t prescribing a combination/dose of meds that will kill/harm the patient. They also answer questions the patients have. They generally don’t do research. </p>
<p>The US won’t be doing a lot of pharma research in the future. That has been offshored and H1-bed. Also the CEO’s decided not to do a lot of research and just hoard the money. Now that their blockbuster drugs are coming off patent, they are losing their revenue and are plain screwed. Chalk up another casualty to greed and short-sightedness.</p>
<p>You can major in anything you want as long as you complete the pharmacy school pre-requisite coursework and take the PCAT. Some schools also have programs where you complete undergrad and the PharmD degree in 6 years. A lot of my friends that went on to pharmacy school were biochemistry or chemistry majors, though that doesn’t really matter, since you can major in whatever interests you.</p>
<p>As far as medicinal chemistry research, you would really need a PhD for that rather than a PharmD. This is why some pharmacy schools have combined PharmD-PhD programs. Perhaps you would be interested in those.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses everybody.
Are there specific types of undergrad schools best suited for going to pharm school, like science/technology focused schools? Or does it not matter?</p>
<p>Be very careful w/ pharmacy. Expect 100k+ student loan debt and a very, very, very tight job market. PharmD has run into the same problem law has: too many schools opening up pumping out PharmDs like candy because no organization limits the number of grads or grad schools that can open, too many people flocking to the career chasing after pseduo lucrative salaries that have been overhyped by schools looking to gouge students out of lucrative tuition money, and many firms conslidating/using new technology to cut out a lot of pharmacist jobs since they cost a lot of money. Take it from the pharmacists themselves:</p>
<p>I don’t understand how people haven’t caught on to the fact that professional schools are highly overrated (except maybe medicine which is tightly regulated) considering how much debt it gets you into and the worsening job prospects. Schools are flat out LYING to people, promising bright futures and big salaries in fields that are being way oversaturated with graduates loaded up with as much debt as possible.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t take the doom and gloom that you hear on a forum frequented by high school and college aged individuals to heart, let alone the ■■■■■ who comments commonly in the science section. If you would want to make rational decisions, I would start with authoritative resources like the US Bureau of Labor Statistics [Pharmacists[/url</a>] which predicts that pharmacists will grow as a career “faster than average” with “excellent job prospects”. For that matter, I would suggest that if you are really interested in becoming a biological scientist, that you explore that as well [url=<a href=“http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos047.htm]Biological”>http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos047.htm]Biological</a> Scientists](<a href=“http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos079.htm#outlook]Pharmacists[/url”>http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos079.htm#outlook) which is predicted to grow “much faster than average, though there will continue to be competition for basic research positions”. I am surprised to hear that you were deterred from science because of the financial outlook- the median salary is 64K per year. You are getting the perspective of individuals who are still in the training phase of their careers (which is admittedly quite long).</p>
<p>I am 30 years old and have 7 years experience. I can assure this is not the training stage of my so-called career and I wouldn’t call anything I received from my employers training. It’s pretty much show up be able to do your job from day one, receive no development, or be fired and replaced by another peon.</p>
<p>I honestly have no idea where they get the idea biology jobs are going to grow at a fast pace. Also the median biology job is nowhere near 60k more like $25k-$35k with no benefits. There are a few biologists still working in pharma or regulatory affairs that make a decent salary but their are hordes and hordes of people with BS Bios unemployed or underemployed. I think BLS takes the people with salaried titles of Biologist or Senior Biologist and finds the median. It tells you nothing how likely to get a job you are.</p>
<p>The last ACS chem survey indicated <20% of grads have decent full time jobs (~40% are listed as full time employed but over half of those are in academia working some crap tech job for garbage wages) and there are tons more chem jobs than bio jobs and fewer chem majors than bios majors.</p>
<p>Welp, there is a lot of mixed messages in this thread.
Basically ignore pharmacy for a second, what can a bright person that is not a people person (at all lol) do as a career that is not management or engineering? </p>
<p>I would immediately go for chemical engineering, but I’m terrible with spatial reasoning and have only above average math skills, nothing superb (85-90th percentile on SAT math sections). And even worse, I’m more theoretically-minded than hands-on oriented. Basically, I’m the guy you want to cheat off on a test, not a physics lab experiment.</p>
<p>High school and college aged? Come again please. We are just the recent college graduates who have worked in industry for ~5 years and REALLY know what the game is currently like. And you are? </p>
<p>I’ll give you my background–A honor roll college student with a 3.90 in chemistry GPA and a 3.98 math GPA double major who has 5 years full time experience working in the pharmaceutical industry. Guess what I did take the PCAT and even scored a 98% tile on the exam and was 2 inches close to applying to pharm school. And you know why I didn’t apply? Because of the insane amount of debt that you have to take out in order to go to school and the worsening job prospects for PharmDs due to the never ending expansion of new schools opening up granting PharmDs. Did you even watch the video at all? The organization in charge of granting accreditation for PharmD schools in Chicago generated half of all its income ff of new accreditations. </p>
<p>You think organizations like that really give 2 craps about PharmD students and weather or not they can get a job afterwards with 100+k in debt? Yeah right. All they care about is getting revenue by accrediting as many schools as they can. Schools only care about soaking gullible pawns for as much student loan debt as they can. The ones at the bottom (students) get stuck with having to deal with the *****storm. No one cares about you or weather or not you can get a job, everyone only cares about how much money they can make off a sucker like you. </p>
<p>You want to know why places like the BLS still have rosy outlooks for fields like Pharmacy? Because they haven’t factored into their equations the huge increase in the number of PharmD granting schools and the number of upcoming new PharmD grads yet. The effects of all of these new PharmD schools won’t be seen for another 5-10 years, which will effect the students going into the schools now. Pharmacy, which requires their students to go 100+k in debt, is a huge bubble waiting to burst just like law and MBA degrees.</p>