I’m currently an undergrad as a bio major (first semester) - turns out I hate bio!
So im considering chemistry or neuroscience…anyway I was thinking about post UG school
I always wanted to be a doctor but the debt is really unattractive so I was thinking about becoming either a PA or a Pharmacist while pursuing med school on the side. Im leaning to pharmacy but I really don’t know the process of becoming one.
After UG, what do I do?
I know theres the pcat but is it a four year program after that?
and is residency a thing?
is the job market over saturated?
As for PAs…
what’s the process after UG?
is there residency?
oversaturated job market?
The process through pharmacy school is relatively similar to medical school. At the same time as pre-med students take the MCAT, you’d take the PCAT and use that to apply to pharmacy schools. PhamD programs are, like MD programs, 4 years in length. The first three years consist of core curriculum, and the last consists of rotations. However, pharmacy rotations are not exclusively clinical, a P4 pharmacy student could also be rotating in community pharmacies as well as industrial settings.
After graduating with a PharmD, you essentially have three career paths. You could obviously work in a community pharmacy such as CVS or Walgreen’s, but you could also decide to work in a hospital or industrial setting. Hospital pharmacy requires two separate, post-graduate year (PGY) residencies, which would each be a year in length. The PGY1 residency familiarizes the PharmD with working in a hospital setting, while the PGY2 residency allows the PharmD to specialize within a certain field of hospital pharmacy (oncology, pediatric, neurology, etc.) The pharmacy residency student-institution matching system parallels the NRMP for medical students. Industry pharmacy on the other hand often, but not always, requires post-graduate fellowships, which can be multiple years in length.
I guess the current job market for community pharmacists could be described as over-saturated, but the PharmD is such a versatile degree that it opens pathways into other pharmaceutical fields that may not be apparent to the general public.
@jgandhi - One other career path (my wife is a pharmacist). You could work for one of the large prescription benefit companies that handle mail order/internet prescriptions such as Walgreens, CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, etc. For example, my wife does prescription verifications. She actually works for home at a computer with two screens. She has to review the Doctor’s prescription, the patient’s drug profile, and verify that the pharmacy technician has filled the correct drug… It sounds dull as can be to me, but she loves it. Other pharmacists handle doctor calls where there are questions about dosages or generic substitutions.
Also, you may be able to start a PharmD program after three years of school. Be forewarned; Pharmacy school is not easy.
For a PA program, most students have a bachelor’s degree with 2-3 years of healthcare experience. The PA program takes two years. I was talking to a guy a couple of years ago about a PA. He was originally on track to apply to medical school and decided on the PA track instead. He reasoned that it would take less time and have regular hours, but still with a good salary. Starting salaries range in the $90s.
You could also consider heading for a Nurse Practitioner degree. The NP degree is generally equivalent to a PA degree, except that an NP can practice without direct supervision by an MD. You could major in nursing and then head on to a three year masters of science in nursing degree. And if you are male, job prospects for male nurses are excellent, perhaps even better than for female nurses. Starting salaries are comparable to those for PAs.
And then there’s always Veterinary Medicine. A DVM takes four years. There are only 20 Vet schools in the US and admissions are very competitive.
You cannot “pursue med school on the side.” Of anything. Medical school is an intensive, full-time process; med students don’t really have time to work at all, let alone work work in a professional career like a pharmacist or physicians assistant. Also, your plan doesn’t really make sense in the context of avoiding debt. Pharmacy school is about the same length of time and costs around the same as medical school (check out [USC’s cost of attendance](https://pharmacyschool.usc.edu/programs/pharmd/pharmdprogram/cost/) here, or Washington State University’s [here](https://www.pharmacy.wsu.edu/prospectivestudents/)).
However, pharmacists have lower average salaries than physicians ($121,000 a year vs. $187,000 a year); I’d also be willing to bet that there’s a much wider range of medical salaries (Medscape reports that their primary care practitioners average $217K and their specialists $319K, and some specialists in areas like dermatology, cardiology, and orthopedics reported making $350-450K or more).
So pharmacy will not save you from big debt. Being a PA will put you in considerably less, as the program is only two years and they tend to be cheaper than MDs and PharmDs. But you do need to get 2-3 years of healthcare experience - and by experience, you have to have been working in a direct patient care role, like a nurse, paramedic, or CNA. CNA is probably the easiest route to go (I think the training is like a semester) but the pay is very low. Becoming a nurse after college would take you an additional 1-1.5 years in an accelerated program, assuming you have the right prerequisites, but that would have the highest pay while you work for 2-3 years, and then you could do either a PA or an NP program.
You will have to choose which of these three options you want. (Of course, you could always do them sequentially if you really wanted to, but that will be massive debt.)
You could also think about a 2 + 4 PharmD program. Many schools allow you to enter into the Pharmacy school after 2 years of undergrad and then you get your PharmD in 6 years. Much cheaper than medical school.
Some pharmacy schools are 0-6. You are admitted to the pharmacy schools as a freshman, no PCAT.
And again, “pursuing medical school on the side” is a ludicrous statement.
I won’t go to Med school or PharmD if you hate biology. There is a lot of biology courses that you need to take.