So I’m currently a senior in high school. My main focus during the college application process was good undergraduate schools for pre med students. I got accepted to SUNY Buffalo, and they gave me a $20,000 merit-based scholarship to cover non-tuition costs. Since I am a NY resident, I would also get the Excelsior Scholarship, which would cover my total cost of tuition, so SUNY Buffalo is definitely high up on my list. But I also just got my acceptance package from the 6 year PharmD program at St. Johns, and they gave me a scholarship in the amount of full tuition. Here’s my dilemma. Becoming a pharmacist was originally just Plan B. Plan A was always medical school. But now that I’m thinking about it, if I go the pharmacy route, I’ll be able to come out in 6 years and get a job that pays at least $100k. If I go to med school, I’ll come out in 8 years with hundreds of thousands in debt and only a resident’s salary to start paying it off. Pharmacy seems like the obvious option then, but my fear is that if I don’t go to med school I’ll always wonder what would’ve happened if I had. Can anyone help me out?
Not eight years, more like 10+.
Keep in mind that about 75% would be premeds never make it to the ‘med school application’ stage and among these about 40% get in. Your odds of making it into med school are very very low.
Your odds of becoming a pharmacist are very high.
So 90% odds of becoming a pharmacist v. 90% of not becoming a doctor.
Plus there’s nothing preventing a pharmacist from having a change of career plans and applying to medical school after working in his own profession for a few years.
Rule of thumb for potential physicians–if there is any other career you can see yourself being happy doing–do the other career, not medicine.
you an go to pharmacy and then med…that will always help you pursue medical track if you choose at that point …bottom line, you are in school 2 more years if you go from pharm to med. if not you look pretty w a well paid pharm degree. in the scheme of 11 year track to being a doc you take 13 but you have a well paid degree w almost no loans at the halfway mark.
depends on your passion for medicine. either will lead you there… good luck. you are at a good place to start …
Couple things to be considered. St John’s PharmD program is 6 yrs and full scholarship typically only covers the first 4 yrs (undergrad) so the last 2 yrs you’ll pay full tuition (that’s $40k/yr, which is my nephew is paying). The PharmD program has pretty high attrition rate in the first 2-3 yrs (I heard close to 40-50%). After my nephew survived the first 2 years, he started kicking himself for why not going pre-med because he thought he could do much better with MD instead of PharmD considering all the science (bio, chem) courses are pretty much the same. St John’s PharmD is a great program and he had no problem finding pretty good pay pharm-tech job at NYC hospital while he’s still pursuing PharmD. As other said, you’ll need to wait couple years after PharmD to apply to med school (same goes for nursing students). The main key difference is that Pharmacy is a saturated job market while MD is not, but pre-med route carries much higher risk (only 25% survive to get to the application stage and 40% accepted each application cycle).