Applying to Pharmacy School after graduating

[kp1749]

Hey guys,

I recently graduated with my undergrad in biomedical engineering. I decided to take a gap year and will be applying to medical school in a couple months, but I've decided to also consider pharmacy school in the past few days due to below average stats (for med school).

I did a little research on the pre-reqs required for several schools and noticed a lot of them requires microbiology. Although I do have all the pre-med requirements, I do not have a microbiology course. Furthermore, my first gen chem and first biology were AP credit, as well as psych, econ, and a bunch of other elective classes.

I'm wondering how strict pharmacy schools are with pre-requisites. Do admission committees ever make exceptions on case by case basis? Having recently graduated, I hope I don't have to take a semester of classes just for one or two classes.

Thanks

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[CMUchicka]

DONT use pharmacy as back up! GO TO MED SCHOOL!! Did you research how is job market for pharmacy ?? There are many many threads here about it, check them out so you won't regret going into pharmacy. Since you graduated from biomedical engineering, why not work for year or two while you strengthen your med school application?? Look if i were you i would work super hard to get into med school. It has everything : money, respect, flexibility. None of it is possible in pharmacy at current job market.

 

[El Trombopag]

Hey guys,

I recently graduated with my undergrad in biomedical engineering. I decided to take a gap year and will be applying to medical school in a couple months, but I've decided to also consider pharmacy school in the past few days due to below average stats (for med school).

I did a little research on the pre-reqs required for several schools and noticed a lot of them requires microbiology. Although I do have all the pre-med requirements, I do not have a microbiology course. Furthermore, my first gen chem and first biology were AP credit, as well as psych, econ, and a bunch of other elective classes.

I'm wondering how strict pharmacy schools are with pre-requisites. Do admission committees ever make exceptions on case by case basis? Having recently graduated, I hope I don't have to take a semester of classes just for one or two classes.

Thanks

It probably varies from program to program, but the state school I went to gave no leeway. I had worked 10+ years as a clinical microbiologist, infectious disease, had a dozen publications [multiple first authorships] and they still wouldn't/couldn't budge on a silly micro 101 requirement. So I had to take it up at a junior college as an evening class. Most programs want to have uniform standards for everyone, and nice documentation to show to accreditation bodies.

It is good to get used to 'jumping through the hoops'. Wish I could say it was the last silly thing I had to do for the degree.

 

[PharmtoCS]

Stay in biomedical engineering. If you go into pharmacy, then you will trade a decent profession for an additional $200k+ loans, 4 more years of schooling, and much worse job prospects.

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[Pharmd = Phake Doctor]

Unless you're well-connected in the pharmacy setting, don't bother. People like to think there is meritocracy in pharmacy, but the truth is its like any other field outside medicine.

People with connections will get jobs over people who do not.

 

[YF786]

Why aren't you pursuing biomedical engineering? I have seen posts where people who do pharmacy say they should have done biomedical engineering or computer science right now instead of pharmacy school.

 

[DrDrugs2012]

Do an opportunity cost analysis. If we are looking at purely dollars and cents, your opportunity cost of pharmacy school is not merely 4 years of tuition/loans; it is also the foregone salary, benefits (e.g. 401k match), experience which translates to being that much closer to promotions, etc. Then you need to create trajectories of income, adjust for tax, and arrive at a sum of values under the income curve. You do this again for your pharmacy career and account for loan repayment and find where the two curve intersect - that is your payoff period: the number of years it takes for pharmacy to have greater payoff than the status quo.

When you do the real cost of choosing pharmacy school over a career in biomedical engineering, chances are that your financial break even point is at about age 55-60 (educated guesstimate). This means that your income from pharmacy probably only exceeds that of biomedical engineering by about 50k over your lifetime.

You can repeat this exercise taking into account a dollar value for time, quality of life etc (as all economists can place values on everything) and you can adjust your decision from there.

 

[ricemilo]

I had an issue with plagiarism at school which made them decide to suspend me for summer for something worth 3% of the grade in a class. My gpa is 2.95 however, I have some volunteer work, research, shadowed a pharmacist and I am involved in some organizations on campus. Please I wanted to know the best way to study for the pcat,schools to apply into and how to explain my issue.
Thanks