The RIPs used to have a BS check vetting purpose for the MS Clinical Pharmacy (and sometimes PhD) students as a cursory review by researchers outside your institution to see whether their MS project or thesis/dissertation would pass peer review muster which is less friendly than the committee where the internal members exceed the external. They used to be a sounding board kind of like a trial oral qualifier where ideas would run and would be picked apart to the point where the MS or PhD candidate could make changes or possibly discontinue the study in favor of something else. RIP was also a sounding board for pilot work to get feedback on whether this could be scaled up to a real clinical trial. Present day, many RIPs from residency projects just don't get done, and MS degrees are rarely conferred outside of specialty residencies.
