Hi everybody,
My daughter is now a junior and leaning towards a pharmacy degree.
At this moment, her stats are:
GPA: 4.92
SAT:1490 (700 English / 790 Math)
Class ranking: 8/520 (not sure if it matters)
Several extracurricular - cross country for 4 years, track (4 years), NHS, Red cross, organizer of Special Olympics …etc
Leadership : captain of cross country team for 2 years, maybe treasurer for NHS (she is applying now), camp councilor at the Summer Town Camps
I am trying to educate myself on the easiest path of becoming a Pharm D and is pretty confusing.
What I understood so far:
Route 1. She can do a bachelor in science (chemistry or biology), then apply to any Pharmacy School for a 4 year degree in Pharm D
Route 2. She can apply to a 6 year pharmacy program - however after the first 2 years she still needs to re-apply to the Pharmacy School for Pharm D.
Rumor is that the PCAT exam will be discontinued next year - is that true ???
Questions:
If she chooses Route 1 and doesn’t get in to the Pharmacy School - what profession opportunities she will have with a biology / chemistry science degree ? Can she make a living with such a degree or it is preferable to go to Graduate School ?
If she chooses Route 2 - how is the program called ? I tried to look online and I didn’t find a “pharmacy 6 year program” - it seems to me that she still needs to apply to “something” and in the second year apply to Pharmacy School. How is this working ?
If PCAT will be discontinued by the time she will be able to apply to Pharmacy School, any idea what will be the acceptance criteria ?
P.S. At this moment, I see Route 2 the easiest / fastest / cheaper way.
I am looking forward to hearing some personal experiences.
Just research the profession, hiring and working conditions before jumping on the pharmacy band wagon. Things have really changed over the past years from what I can gather.
When I graduated pharmacy school it was an instant ticket to a great paying career that was in very high demand. The profession garnered a lot of respect in both hospital and retail settings. Access to the profession was basically restricted by limited number of schools and restricted license reciprocity between states. At that time it was a five year program.
Over time it became a 6 year, then 7, and now sometimes 8 year program.
Then many more pharmacy schools started to open (many for profit) and graduated many more students. As you can guess there are finite jobs available. But while the growth was going on there were many more retail pharmacies opening.
Today many of those retail pharmacies (usually called 3 letter) are closing due to financial difficulties. The working staff in the pharmacy department is being cut which is leading to less than ideal working conditions. Add in the great increase in graduates willing to work for less and you end up in a stagnant market with no career growth. Instead of the pharmacist running the department (we were king) now a district manager looking at bottom line wants to run things despite not knowing squat about pharmacy. Of course this is all dependent on your area and company you work for. Hospital/clinic pharmacy is quite a bit better and can be a good gig but obviously everyone wants those positions these days.
If I were doing it all again I would be looking into nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant since that is where the job market growth seems to be and appears to have a broader area to work especially since pharmacy education has grown to be the equivalent number of years in education.
I think the 2023/2024 admission cycle is the last of the PCAT.
Truly appreciate your insight on this, as my D23 is contemplating now on a 5-year PharmD program or going straight bio major. With regards to this statement, are you noticing a downward trend on the level of respect (in both community/hospitals)?
Our daughter started her UC with the intention of going into a Pharm D program. As she started completing the requirements for her BS, and doing some shadowing, she started hearing inklings and grumblings by pharmacists of unhappiness in the ranks. She still liked the research area of the chemical compositions of medicine and chose pharmacology and entered her med program at UCSF. She worked with oncology and pediatric cancer patients and learned about how the chemo and other meds impacts the body with cancer treatments and experimental drugs.
Her friends, who participated in Pharm D “matching” on Match Day, had difficulty being matched because of Covid; the hospitals were full and, believe it or not, the priorities were not pharmacy-related.
Every UC is either opening up a pharm school or has already done so, and the people who were supposed to be replaced by the new grads have decided not to “retire”. Yet the graduates keep coming.
Mail order also seems to have put an additional chink in the profession because there are warehouses of pharm assistants who put together medication orders and are “supervised” by one pharmacist.
My daughter says that for friends who work retail, they don’t work full time hours and don’t get benefits. That really cuts into their work practices and they aren’t “motivated” to be pleasant or make nice and create a good customer service environment. They do the job and that’s it.
Pharm school is expensive. I don’t know if the ROI for your daughter will be worth the effort. My daughter’s friends are competing for the few part time jobs that are available and are looking to other areas for employment.
You need to have this discussion with your daughter.
University of Pacific 2+3 Pharmacy Advantage program where they guarantee admission to PharmD with 3.0 SGPA. They also just recently opened up a partnership with Touro where they will guarantee DO med school to 30 UOP students/yr with 3.5/505 mcat/100 vol hrs.
There was a time a few years ago when my daughter briefly mentioned the possibility of pharmacy school. She had 2 friends in the program at her university. I did a little research on the 10 year job growth and was very happy that she changed her mind without me having to bring it up.
Regarding your concerns about finding employment with a biology and/or chemistry degree- my daughter did it. She was a biology major with a minor in chemistry and Spanish. She worked for 4 years and will be heading back to school this fall.
Pharmacy has been a great career for my spouse but he would pause before recommending it now. A lot has changed, as others have said. Working conditions are not great, and wages are down and not increasing even though there’s once again a lot of open jobs, especially in retail in rural areas. New pharmacists tend to be graduating with a ton of debt and the return just doesn’t seem to be there any more to make all that debt worth it. It’s still an important job, but so much of what pharmacists are capable of adding to healthcare just isn’t being utilized.
As far as the degree itself, I think it’s getting a bit easier to get into pharmacy school as the market for new grads has changed. I’d recommend whatever path avoids the most debt.
She worked as what ? What is the career path with a biology / chemistry degree, how is the job market and can you make a living with only a bachelor, or a graduate school is a must.
I appreciate the responses. I think my daughter is dreaming to do research and not retail. However I cannot say she is passionate about this profession …she is trying to figure out what would be suitable for her and now just leaning towards it for two reasons : 1) because she liked the chemistry class and 2) takes now an AP Physics class and literally hates it.
With no desire for physics, engineering is out of the list, although Biomedical Engineering is a very nice and rewarding profession - but is there any engineering without or very little physics ?
Nursing or physician assistant - out of the list - cannot deal with human pain and despair
So all I can see left is a degree in science - chemistry and/or biology - that is why my interest in the career paths that open with such a degree.
And YES, cost matters - we will help but for sure she will have to get some loans too.
Honestly, I think it depends. Drive, undergrad experiences, work location, interests etc all come into play.
My daughter joined TFA and earned a salary in the mid 60’s. She had no education experience and earned a little more due to the excess science credits. One year she earned in the mid 70’s because she gave up her prep to teach a class. She was in a high paying district, but not everybody wants to do this.
She now works in clinical research (more of a gap year position but people do stay and expand their role) and is making just under 70. She begins grad school in the fall (not in clinical research).
Many who major in biology do continue their education.
Epidemiology, biostatistics, hospital management, health policy…lots of health careers that don’t involve hands on patient care. Your D can start to do research on these…
Perhaps she should look into Pharmacology and toxicology. This is not the same as pharmacy (although some of the curriculum will be the same). It’ll set her up on the research/lab side career-wise (although PharmD’s also go into research). She’ll still have some physics to suffer through but nothing to the extent of engineering.
She can do patient facing clinical research with a biology/chemistry degree.
Biomedical engineering requires physics.
I just realized that your daughter is a HS junior. She has time to figure it out. She can major in biology, chemistry, public health etc and see where it takes her.
Pharmacy school is the almost same price as medical school. It’s 4 years at approximately over $65K per year or $260K and that is on the cheap end. She won’t have a lot of time to work another job because she will be in classes memorizing a lot of information.
If you have to rely on loans, to fund your daughter’s pharmacy education, you will be paying a long time to finish paying it off. You’ll also have to pay her rent while at pharmacy school. What if she can’t find a match for a pharmacy residency? It’s very super competitive because there are only so many hospitals and tons of graduates.
