<p>Does anyone have any questions about Pharmacy School? I'm a first year pharmacy student at the University of Michigan, so ask away!</p>
<p>Well, lets see,.. </p>
<p>1) What does it take to get in? </p>
<p>2)Whats it like(in pharm school)?( rote based or problem based etc.)</p>
<p>What does it take to get in? Depends from school to school. There's usually a huge number of prerequisite courses: organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, biology, and physics and then a number of electives that vary from school to school. On the better end, it doesn't hurt to have a high PCAT (though in comparison to the MCAT, it's a joke. california schools also choose to not require the exam for admissions), a good science GPA, and most importantly, the drive to go out there and help advance the profession. I didn't have a stellar GPA when I applied, but my extracurriculars were very strong, as were my essays . All schools require you to go for an interview. I also went to Tufts for my undergrad, which probably helped.</p>
<p>Pharmacy school is a lot applied basic sciences that I learned as an undergrad. For once chemistry has a <em>useful</em> application in life, as it's integrated into the understandings of physiology. Everyone has the idea that pharmacy school is about counting pills, which was a stereotype that was maybe true about 50 years ago. Clinical pharmacy (what I'm interested in) stresses the application of therapeutics to recommend changes or treatments to patients/physicians/other health care professionals in a hospital setting. </p>
<p>As for the school itself, a lot of our exams are problem solving based and critical thinking, though a lot of the pharmaceutical care courses are geared towards learning behavioral/professional mannerisms. It's challenging, but I still have a life. A lot of my friends in medical school are absolutely miserable because of the amount of work that they have to do.</p>
<p>Do you think it would be ok to use AP credit for biology or is that class too important?</p>
<p>How would you compare organic chem to regular chem? Is it a class that could be taken over the summer without being overwhelmed by info?</p>
<p>When calculating your GPA, does the AdComm also include the classes that aren't on the pre-pharm requirements (like it says to take Calc, and I will have taken college algebra and trig, will they include those classes too?)</p>
<p>How did you like calculus? Do you recommend taking trig before it? (I think I got a B+ or A- in HS trig, then a B in college algebra)</p>
<p>If you don't mind, what was your overall GPA, science GPA, and PCAT score?</p>
<p>O-Chem: you either love it or you hate it.</p>
<p>Organic Chemistry is nothing like General Chemistry. It is a completely different type of Chemistry than you will have seen up to it, which is probably why most people struggle with it. They are used to the watered-down Inorganic they learn in general chemistry.</p>
<p>I have known quite a few people who have elected to take O-Chem during the summer. They do that for one of two reasons. They are either re-taking it because they failed it the first time or they want plenty of time to devote to the course. Taking it in the summer will give you that advantage since you won't have any other coursework to deal with, but you will be forced to eat and sleep O-Chem while you take the class to keep up. It's a two-edged sword; pick your poison.</p>
<p>Well it shouldn't really matter if you use your AP credit if you do well on the PCAT, but you have to be sure as some schools will accept it and others will not. It's not just a strict numbers approach as they consider trends, difficulty of the semester, and other extraneous factors that may or may not have altered your grades. They look at everything, but assign importance to different factors in the grand scheme.
Calculus was okay. Yes trig is necessary to understand calculus, but if you took it anyways, you should be fine.
My overall GPA was probably around a 3.3 and my science GPA around a 3.1. I had a PCAT composite score of the 95th percentile the first time I took it, though I thought I could have done better had I studied. It probably made up for my mediocre science grades. There was however a trend of increasing grades throughout my collegiate years.</p>
<p>how exactly do pharmacy programs work... do you major in it, do you take your first two years for the pre-reqs and apply for pharm school...or what? I am interested in going to medical school and if that doesnt work possibly pharmacy. So, could i major in microbiology (fullfills pre reqs for medical and pharm) and then apply to both medical and pharm programs?</p>
<p>Pharmacy programs are (mostly) 4 year doctoral program that requires at the very minimum two years of prerequisites. I don't think any programs require you to have a bachelors, although some programs have a near 99% composition of matriculating students with degrees. Yes, you can major in whatever you like as long as you fulfill the requirements for whatever school you choose to apply to. I would look carefully at medicine; I used think that it was what I wanted, but I realized that it was only what I wanted because the scope of what I knew was rather limited. In high school (and very much an extent in college), your career options are difficult to see unless you take the initiative to go out there and find out what intrigues you in life. I enjoyed pharmacy ultimately more than medicine mostly because I find applications of physiology with medications more interesting than diagnosis.</p>
<p>There are some students in my entering class that are 20 years old, and I believe there was even one student who was 18 who managed to complete all her requirements in high school. While my program has a decent amount of students from the University of Michigan undergrad (albeit stiff competition, especially from the direct high school entrance program), it's usually variable depending on which schools you look at in terms of entrance quality and admissions standards.</p>
<p>Thank you so much, your post was very helpful. I think I do need to find what intrigues me most (my dad keeps telling me this also). I'll continue my research and hopefully find what I would enjoy the most. Thanks again.</p>
<p>Pharmacist.com</a> | Career Option Profiles</p>
<p>This is a very useful website in explaining just a fraction of what's possible with a PharmD degree. I ultimately plan - with my naive goals as a P1 student - to specialize in infectious disease after completing a residency. To be honest, I find new things about the profession every day, so I expect my focus to change as I advance throughout my pharmacy education.</p>
<p>I'm just wondering, does it really matter which pharm school you go to?</p>
<p>and I remember on one of your replies in another thread you said you didn't recommend 0-6 programs...why not?</p>
<p>It depends on what you want to do. Different schools have different goals and standards in producing PharmDs. At the University of Michigan, we are heavily biased towards clinical pharmacy. We're even required to do a 4th year research project. The faculty here ARE the people who wrote the textbooks in pharmacy, so you get to do some awesome stuff if that's your calling. It's a little startling to read research articles on pubmed and realize that the author was the one who taught your medicinal chemistry course. Also, it's pretty typical that the "better" a school is, the more the school will take care of you and its alumni. The connections factor is not to be ignored in the real world, especially with the brand name that will get you a leg up in whatever position you are going after. When people hear that you came from ____ school, it is generally given the benefit of the doubt that you are of a certain quality.</p>
<p>But of course this is all dependent on perception and its respective environment. If you just want to work at CVS, then no, it does not matter. If you want to pursue a particular clinical specialty in a residency/fellowship at the best rotation spots - then yes, it does matter. If you want to go into academia, research or industry, it definitely matters. Better schools provide you with better rotation sites that normally come with large teaching hospital institutions (often combined in rounds with medical students). You get better exposure to what happens in your textbooks and actual therapeutic application in a clinical setting. You also get the chance to experience all the different parts of pharmacy that may spark your interest in a particular field that you ultimately may want to specialize in, whether it be cardiology, pediatrics, ER, ambulatory, geriatrics, or nuclear pharmacy at just the tip of the iceberg. </p>
<p>My own prejudices against 0-6 programs is that they are very limited in their curriculum (it's condensed) while also locking you into a particular university. If you had the choice between having a prestigious undergraduate education versus a guaranteed professional acceptance - it's a tough situation to weigh. I'm a firm believer in education for education's sake; it's not the end goal of getting your PharmD that matters, it's the path you take to get there. I did not have any idea of what I wanted to do in life when I was an undergraduate, let alone high school. Honestly, at this point in your life, how could you possibly know what is out there in a particular profession? Some may disagree with me and claim they have the maturity to choose their decisions due to monetary considerations in life, but that's still a minority of the population compared to the possibility of not finding the "right" path. You deserve to give yourself time and the ability to choose. Yes, you might lose out on some money via opportunity costs, but if you're going to spend your whole life in a profession such as pharmacy, you'd better be damn sure this is the right path. The worst realization is finding out that a profession isn't for you and not having a backup plan for when that happens. Sure it may be safe and great to have a high paying job quickly, but using a profession as a stepping stone to find what you want to do is really tragic if things could have turned out differently just through a rearrangement of event order (especially since you had no other choices or options to compare it to). This happens to a lot of people in life, but risking early confinement to these boundaries is hardly fun. Pharmacy can be a very rewarding profession IF you are ready for it.</p>
<p>Some interesting sites on pharmacist salaries:</p>
<p><a href="http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/swzl_compresult_national_HC07000011.html%5B/url%5D">http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/swzl_compresult_national_HC07000011.html</a>
According to salary.com, the average pharmacist salary has risen to 102k/year. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but it gives a ballpark estimate of salaries given the nation's huge shortage.</p>
<p>Salaries will likely fluctuate depending on cost of living and location.</p>
<p>hi, i just got an interview letter from a pharmacy school. could you please tell what to do? and if you can write me any interview questions in general.
thank you for your help.</p>