dgroulx said:
I remember high school. Did you see the movie Dazed and Confused about high school in the 1970's? Let me stress high in high school. The girls bathroom was always thick with pot smoke. Sometimes I went to class. I still managed to keep a 3.2 GPA. If I had this attitude with pharmacy school, I would have flunked out my first semester.
Several of my undergrad classes were harder than my pharmacy school classes. Like everyone has said, it is the amount of work that is hard. You can't go by credit hours. For instance, Practicum is a one credit hour course. For that one credit hour each week, I have a 2 hour rotation and another 1 hour class called Integrated Case Studies which requires research and presentations. It isn't hard, but this extra work eats into your study time.
Overall, I find that pharmacy school is more difficult than undergrad and much, much more difficult than high school.
The reason I said it was easier than high school is because I spent less time going to class or studying the material. I went to high school everyday, I missed most days of pharmacy school. The material isnt difficult, I can agree that its a lot of material, much more than the material in high school, but the level of difficulty isnt any higher. Any monkey can learn a list of side effects and drug interactions. The clinical stuff might be tougher to grasp but most dont bother with it anyways, they want to make money and be retail rxists. I had never worked in pharmacy, not before pharm school, not during and not after. I easily passed EVERY single class and rotation, on top of that I did a study that could have been published had I pursued it.
My undergraduate was the opposite.... Complicated abstract theory, major calculations, not as much material but the level of difficulty was exponentially higher. Multi-variable calculus, diff eq, and 5-6 engineering level physics courses cant compare in difficulty to the pharmacology or pharmacokinetic material. Perhaps biology majors have it easy undergrad and thats why many of my pharmacy classmates thought pharmacy school was hard, or maybe it was because they were from less strenuous undergraduate schools.
I think the same holds true for any professional school (medical, dental, vet, optometry). In my experience everyone intelligent found the material easy but the workload immense. IMO pharmacy school is a joke, to get a doctorate seems rediculous. Its just a glorified vocational school. ANY tech can do what a pharmacist does and MOST techs barely graduated high school.
Im not here to flame anyone for being a pharmacist or for wanting to go to pharmacy school, please dont be offended, afterall I too went to pharmacy school. The field has been dumbed down, back when pharmacists actually compounded medication and had to know chemistry it was a real profession. Retail pharmacists are nothing more than specialized customer service reps. Obviously this excludes clinicians and people who work in resarch.
Pharmacy schools are popping up left and right, its a business first a school second. They focus on producing retail pharmacists, the chains need them (they are big businesses too). Again, this isnt all schools, the schools that were established 100 years ago have produced intelligent individuals that have made advances in the field, but nowadays that is fading, the majority of graduates arent "professional" and the newer schools certainly arent capable of providing the caliber of education that the established schools do.
I havent been impressed with anyone (even most faculty) I met at pharmacy school or anyone who is a pharmacist. Again maybe I am jaded because of the classmates I had in undergrad, I dont know, but I do know that anyone can get into and graduate from pharmacy school. It was clearly evident to me from both my classmates and my preceptors. You dont even need to have a grasp of the english language. I had a classmate once ask me for the directions of use of the "Jurassic" patch. This is one example of 100's maybe 1000's I could give.
