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This may be a little long, so I'll put a TL
R at the bottom.
My parents had never graduated college but were debt free and had common sense, so after looking into different career options in highschool, I settled on pharmacy and looked for a job at a local place. The store that picked me up (WAGS) was 40 minutes drive away and as a cashier never advanced me to tech despite my reminders. I got to serve in the drive through after school from 4:30 to 6:30 then go home. Watched pharmacists turn over after cracking from the stress during the 5 years I was there, so a few weeks after I got "promoted" (became an Intern with the state) they told me how to counsel for Amoxil/Lortab and then stuck back in the same place/shift. I left the next week.
Spent pharmacy school learning that PharmSchool is 95% about graduating people that pay them money. Used this to my advantage to learn the stuff I wanted and extort the school for their own rules. The job market was/is saturated around the school, so I settled for a job teaching Bio/Chem/Math to disadvantaged students through the university. After some kerfunkle where I got a D in some elective, it dropped my semester GPA to 2.2495 (two semester and graduating gpa to that point was above 3.0) which meant I couldn't go on my community IPPE the first summer. The school informed me of this 2 days before the start of June. Their suggestion was that I get a summer job.
I ended up working for these three nearly retired pharmacists for minimum wage at their slow, small town community store and their big town closed-door nursing home delivery pharmacy on alternating days. Since I was their pet project they did their best to show me how to run the businesses and shoot their firearm collection (the closed-door pharmacy basement was a personal shooting range). I also took the lack of IPPE as an opportunity to visit a few dozen pharmacies on the weekends/other days off over a 300 mile radius; specialty, compounding, holistic, infusion, but mostly remote independent pharmacies. A lot of networking and a collection of business cards.
Third semester rolls around so that summer job ends, I'm put into "remedial probation" that consisted of two meetings with a designated staff member in a "I just remembered I needed to do this, how are your grades? Okay, now shoo..." format. Since my summer IPPE became a winter IPPE, I stop by this staff member's office the beginning of December to discuss it, and he's completely forgotten this is happening. I hand him a business card and tell him I'd like to go here. He doesn't know the place and he sees the stack of cards I have in my case and inquires about them, from which we launch into a discussion of how I spent my summer. He makes copies of all the cards b/c apparently they're hurting for preceptors and haven't been able to use any manpower to find new ones.
I spend winter at my grandmother's house and my IPPE at Pharmacist Kickass. They guy gets up, runs 12 miles, does a strength circuit, eats oats and bananas, opens his independent pharmacy with an awesome soda/coffee/fudge stand. Practically gives away OTC's and food to employees/customers all day and does 700+ prescriptions with his team of techs (no state limit on these), after which he goes teach wrestling/baseball/youth group in the evenings. His wife is the only other pharmacist, so she fills in when when he has a dental appointment. I'd call him later if I had a problem on an assignment and he could practically recite the answer like he had a textbook in front of him. One of those guys who might not know that the earth revolves around the sun or that popcorn pops because of the water inside of it, but what good does that knowledge do you? So I spend my weeks learning everything I can about what he's doing there and how to optimize a soda fountain for maximum tastiness.
School resumes and my next summer IPPE for hospital they send me to a remote place they hadn't sent anyone for 7 years, a 30 bed hospital built around a natural spring with live ducks and fishing in the open area in the middle. Patient rooms on the inside with one-way glass so they could see the landscaping. I got placed there because (surprise!) they have to beg institutions for IPPE hospital slots, and since I made a point of having an intern license in every state I shadowed in last summer so I had the honor of being placed so far away.
Anyways, it turns out PharmSchool borked up again and made my living arrangements 70 miles away, so I found my own in town and paid for it myself. Turns out PharmSchool borked up further and told my preceptor I was supposed to show up 2 weeks earlier (during school apparently :/ ) and since he was so easy going and had his vacation already scheduled I only spent 2 weeks there. Spent a day in every department, even if not pharmacy related and took the opportunity to revisit pharmacies from last year. According to the IPPE pharmacist the number one most important lesson that he could impart to anyone coming into his hospital was "Get A Prenup or Import a Foreign Girl". After the scripts were filled he would sit in his office to do administration stuff while listening to rock and roll turned up while the tech and I would chat.
Next semester we got a new building to accommodate the new 70% larger class size they were planning to have. It had many problems, most notably the fixtures/doorknobs/paper towel dispensers/etc being cheap and breaking. Also, there were no clocks in the classrooms. General confusion reigned as to exactly when class started, and professors were consistently going over time because there wasn't anything handy to remind them that class was over. This persisted for about a month before I broke down and bought a large wall clock. I used a bent coat hanger to put it on the whiteboard and to everyone's relief classes were more orderly.
It would be carried from room to room for our classes, and when we didn't have class I would leave it up in one of the main rooms, which made for interesting conversations with the other years' classes as to why I would always take "their" clock away. One class tried to hide it so that when I came to take it and found it missing, they would hang it up and keep it for their next class. Eventually the admin. faculty confiscated it because it did not "look professional" to the officials (PharmBoard, state legislators, etc), and the teaching faculty successfully petitioned to get it back from them after the disappointing lack of my usual "placing of the clock" ceremony.
PharmSchool confiscated it again right before finals and returned it to me (broken) at the end of the year, where my innocent "I was only trying to help" **bat eyes** was received with "We really don't want your help." This has made for a good quote when the alumni association comes a-calling for donations.
Rotations was the mixed bag of good and bad, with the odd incidence of a WAGS rotation where the PIC/preceptor hatehatehated me. Probably because I was able to come in and they finally had someone who knew their system from the start and could cover for people's vacations. The only thing I learned from her was the constant bitching to other employees about how the Store Manager micromanaged her and how she wouldn't have stopped floating for another company if she had known that management would be come so demanding. Also how embarrassing she looked when she dialed a Mfg. hotline but hit the wrong number so while she stepped into the back a smutt-line played over the speakerphone. All the patients heard, topkek.
Job Fair time came around and this being spring 2012 all the businesses aren't looking to hire like they were the last years. The army makes a token showing but with no jobs, CVS only wants to hire you for Texas (their rep/DM wore blue jeans, a jeans jacket and had a garish nose-ring for a 45 y/o woman). Not a sign-on bonus in sight, much contrary to what the class who entered PharmSchool thought. A historically record low number of job offers was made that year, I was told. I went around as an employee at Kroger, where I had been trained but the hours were suddenly cut for the pharmacy, so they only worked me on Christmas and New Years. Other students came for interviews at only one or two tables, I came to each of them sequentially and when asked told them that I was being an "equal opportunity employee". The ****s I had to give was exactly 1, and that was for the pizza cutter that Target gave to me. I still use it today.
After graduation it was studying hard for the Naplex (ProntoPass if you're interested) for a month then the state test where I easily passed both. Less than 40 questions on the state exam and 5 of them were about the prescription validity of condoms.... The end of May I thought I should get out there and do some job interviews, so I went for a part time job in the three Big City population centers. Since there's only about 3-5 actual cities in my state, everyone wants to work in those areas because everywhere else is essentially an armpit where you probably don't have a Walmart within 50 miles, and something like a pizza will end up being 50% more due to the material transportation fees.
So this part-time job at a small-but-notable national chain has about 12 applicants for which I am not chosen, but I liked my interview with the DM so much I look into other jobs in the company and, lo!, there is an opening in a small town (about 50k people) less than an hours drive away from one of the big cities. They immediately accepted me for the position, and I found out later that it had been vacant for 6 months (due to nobody wanting to work out of the big towns most likely). Where I was offered $52-55 in Big Towns this job gave me 4-10s as a "manager" in a pharmacy that did about 40 scripts/day for about $60. The other two shifts were covered by local hospital workers. This location, I was informed, would probably close in 2 years or so.
I got to work, trained on site by the covering PIC (who would take naps in the afternoons on a stool during the last half of the training) and helped me clean the place up. Inventory was over double what it should have been due to neglect, recordkeeping was abysmal and customers were returning solely out of sheer habit. The quote from the DM was, "Make the pain go away." After about 3 months it was mostly cleaned up due to spending extra hours of applying some TLC, and it became a mediocre store, even if it was impossible to pull a profit. Since then, it has been a low-stress cash-cow job.
Because I don't need a lot, I payed off my student loans the month they were due. There was no 401-k to speak of, so I threw money into an Edward Jones IRA account and bought my first car cash. The next year the company lost two pharmacists and couldn't do a good job hiring any in Big Town, so I made a deal with the DM; work 1-2 days extra a week in Big Town and convert them to vacation time. Since my store was easy to cover with the two hospital pharmacists able to work the full week, I was pulling in 20 hours PTO most weeks. I used it to follow the advice from my second IPPE rotation and went to Eastern Europe and picked out a nice thin 19 y/o polygot and wifed her up. It's been interesting having all my inlaws in Germany, Ukraine and Russia.
Going over to Europe a total of about 3 months of that year I met a lot of Old Men who were doing the same thing and made a lot of new friends in all part of the USA and the world, even got myself into a documentary about it. One of the best connections I made was my financial adviser who I still talk to once a week and visit occasionally in FL, who got us set up to retire very nicely when I get to be 60 and have more money coming in than what I am making today from annuities. My wifey and I have been married about a year now and things are still awesome. Living fairly frugally, we can still square away $1500 a month after a car loan and retirement is contributed to. The tax refund exceeded 7k, so I'm excited about that.
The problem coming up is that this cash-cow store, after about 4 years of working it, is looking like it's going to close. Working for this company has never been a feasible long-term goal. After two years with the first DM, the position has been reoccupied so many times I just refer to them by their order of presence (currently on DM #6). As I strongly suspect that in the next 9 months this position will be eliminated, my wife and I are trying to consider our priorities in life and prepare ourselves accordingly. She has not yet gotten her green card (SOONtm) or an (American) college degree.
TLDR: I've gotten to live life on my own terms but the status quo is soon to change, so I want insight from those older/smarter than me. Hey, it's been working so far!
Our priorities are:
Caring for our aging parents/grandparents (monetarily)
Spending lots of quality time together (working 4-10s/3-12s/7on7off)
Living very close to where we work (bicycling distance)
College close by (girl cannot drive well)
Children in the next 3-5 years
Other things we consider:
Living close to a major airport (convenience for visiting family)
Ethnically homogenous (MIL is a German immigration worker, they're seeing exactly how "diversity" works out, so sad!)
If we were to live outside 1 hour of a major city it would have to pay Really Well (200k or more)
If we could work at the same institution, e.g. wife being a tech (not likely b/c of policies) or a Resp. Therapist, etc
Right now I've got a few things in the mix. The local hospital (+100 bed?) has a new daytime opening for a pharmacist, and since I've already "managing" two of their staff and living in the same town that's all the references I probably need, so I put in an app for that. They'll eventually have a 7on7off nighttime position too, but I'm less wild about that. I could also do some rural hospital PIC position in another state, a nice 30 hour/week gig, but I'd have to step up my game and learn a lot of stuff before I could feel confident going for that position.
Infusion pharmacy seems interesting, but most of it seems like prep/med review/verification, so maybe if I liked the workplace. If I really wanted to apply myself, I could train for Nuclear Pharmacy, but I haven't thought in that direction for a while. I read on this forum someone had started their own at-home MTM company which my wife could help me do. Starting a consulting business wouldn't probably work with my under-30 youthful features/experience. I could even switch careers entirely or combine it with something else, like computer programming. If worse comes to worse, I could be happy working 2 days a week PRN, although the wife wouldn't like the budget cut.
We know there may not be a perfect job for us out there, but I'm posting this so that I can get some insight and be exposed to other opinions/options. Thanks for reading!
R at the bottom.My parents had never graduated college but were debt free and had common sense, so after looking into different career options in highschool, I settled on pharmacy and looked for a job at a local place. The store that picked me up (WAGS) was 40 minutes drive away and as a cashier never advanced me to tech despite my reminders. I got to serve in the drive through after school from 4:30 to 6:30 then go home. Watched pharmacists turn over after cracking from the stress during the 5 years I was there, so a few weeks after I got "promoted" (became an Intern with the state) they told me how to counsel for Amoxil/Lortab and then stuck back in the same place/shift. I left the next week.
Spent pharmacy school learning that PharmSchool is 95% about graduating people that pay them money. Used this to my advantage to learn the stuff I wanted and extort the school for their own rules. The job market was/is saturated around the school, so I settled for a job teaching Bio/Chem/Math to disadvantaged students through the university. After some kerfunkle where I got a D in some elective, it dropped my semester GPA to 2.2495 (two semester and graduating gpa to that point was above 3.0) which meant I couldn't go on my community IPPE the first summer. The school informed me of this 2 days before the start of June. Their suggestion was that I get a summer job.
I ended up working for these three nearly retired pharmacists for minimum wage at their slow, small town community store and their big town closed-door nursing home delivery pharmacy on alternating days. Since I was their pet project they did their best to show me how to run the businesses and shoot their firearm collection (the closed-door pharmacy basement was a personal shooting range). I also took the lack of IPPE as an opportunity to visit a few dozen pharmacies on the weekends/other days off over a 300 mile radius; specialty, compounding, holistic, infusion, but mostly remote independent pharmacies. A lot of networking and a collection of business cards.
Third semester rolls around so that summer job ends, I'm put into "remedial probation" that consisted of two meetings with a designated staff member in a "I just remembered I needed to do this, how are your grades? Okay, now shoo..." format. Since my summer IPPE became a winter IPPE, I stop by this staff member's office the beginning of December to discuss it, and he's completely forgotten this is happening. I hand him a business card and tell him I'd like to go here. He doesn't know the place and he sees the stack of cards I have in my case and inquires about them, from which we launch into a discussion of how I spent my summer. He makes copies of all the cards b/c apparently they're hurting for preceptors and haven't been able to use any manpower to find new ones.
I spend winter at my grandmother's house and my IPPE at Pharmacist Kickass. They guy gets up, runs 12 miles, does a strength circuit, eats oats and bananas, opens his independent pharmacy with an awesome soda/coffee/fudge stand. Practically gives away OTC's and food to employees/customers all day and does 700+ prescriptions with his team of techs (no state limit on these), after which he goes teach wrestling/baseball/youth group in the evenings. His wife is the only other pharmacist, so she fills in when when he has a dental appointment. I'd call him later if I had a problem on an assignment and he could practically recite the answer like he had a textbook in front of him. One of those guys who might not know that the earth revolves around the sun or that popcorn pops because of the water inside of it, but what good does that knowledge do you? So I spend my weeks learning everything I can about what he's doing there and how to optimize a soda fountain for maximum tastiness.
School resumes and my next summer IPPE for hospital they send me to a remote place they hadn't sent anyone for 7 years, a 30 bed hospital built around a natural spring with live ducks and fishing in the open area in the middle. Patient rooms on the inside with one-way glass so they could see the landscaping. I got placed there because (surprise!) they have to beg institutions for IPPE hospital slots, and since I made a point of having an intern license in every state I shadowed in last summer so I had the honor of being placed so far away.
Anyways, it turns out PharmSchool borked up again and made my living arrangements 70 miles away, so I found my own in town and paid for it myself. Turns out PharmSchool borked up further and told my preceptor I was supposed to show up 2 weeks earlier (during school apparently :/ ) and since he was so easy going and had his vacation already scheduled I only spent 2 weeks there. Spent a day in every department, even if not pharmacy related and took the opportunity to revisit pharmacies from last year. According to the IPPE pharmacist the number one most important lesson that he could impart to anyone coming into his hospital was "Get A Prenup or Import a Foreign Girl". After the scripts were filled he would sit in his office to do administration stuff while listening to rock and roll turned up while the tech and I would chat.
Next semester we got a new building to accommodate the new 70% larger class size they were planning to have. It had many problems, most notably the fixtures/doorknobs/paper towel dispensers/etc being cheap and breaking. Also, there were no clocks in the classrooms. General confusion reigned as to exactly when class started, and professors were consistently going over time because there wasn't anything handy to remind them that class was over. This persisted for about a month before I broke down and bought a large wall clock. I used a bent coat hanger to put it on the whiteboard and to everyone's relief classes were more orderly.
It would be carried from room to room for our classes, and when we didn't have class I would leave it up in one of the main rooms, which made for interesting conversations with the other years' classes as to why I would always take "their" clock away. One class tried to hide it so that when I came to take it and found it missing, they would hang it up and keep it for their next class. Eventually the admin. faculty confiscated it because it did not "look professional" to the officials (PharmBoard, state legislators, etc), and the teaching faculty successfully petitioned to get it back from them after the disappointing lack of my usual "placing of the clock" ceremony.
PharmSchool confiscated it again right before finals and returned it to me (broken) at the end of the year, where my innocent "I was only trying to help" **bat eyes** was received with "We really don't want your help." This has made for a good quote when the alumni association comes a-calling for donations.
Rotations was the mixed bag of good and bad, with the odd incidence of a WAGS rotation where the PIC/preceptor hatehatehated me. Probably because I was able to come in and they finally had someone who knew their system from the start and could cover for people's vacations. The only thing I learned from her was the constant bitching to other employees about how the Store Manager micromanaged her and how she wouldn't have stopped floating for another company if she had known that management would be come so demanding. Also how embarrassing she looked when she dialed a Mfg. hotline but hit the wrong number so while she stepped into the back a smutt-line played over the speakerphone. All the patients heard, topkek.
Job Fair time came around and this being spring 2012 all the businesses aren't looking to hire like they were the last years. The army makes a token showing but with no jobs, CVS only wants to hire you for Texas (their rep/DM wore blue jeans, a jeans jacket and had a garish nose-ring for a 45 y/o woman). Not a sign-on bonus in sight, much contrary to what the class who entered PharmSchool thought. A historically record low number of job offers was made that year, I was told. I went around as an employee at Kroger, where I had been trained but the hours were suddenly cut for the pharmacy, so they only worked me on Christmas and New Years. Other students came for interviews at only one or two tables, I came to each of them sequentially and when asked told them that I was being an "equal opportunity employee". The ****s I had to give was exactly 1, and that was for the pizza cutter that Target gave to me. I still use it today.
After graduation it was studying hard for the Naplex (ProntoPass if you're interested) for a month then the state test where I easily passed both. Less than 40 questions on the state exam and 5 of them were about the prescription validity of condoms.... The end of May I thought I should get out there and do some job interviews, so I went for a part time job in the three Big City population centers. Since there's only about 3-5 actual cities in my state, everyone wants to work in those areas because everywhere else is essentially an armpit where you probably don't have a Walmart within 50 miles, and something like a pizza will end up being 50% more due to the material transportation fees.
So this part-time job at a small-but-notable national chain has about 12 applicants for which I am not chosen, but I liked my interview with the DM so much I look into other jobs in the company and, lo!, there is an opening in a small town (about 50k people) less than an hours drive away from one of the big cities. They immediately accepted me for the position, and I found out later that it had been vacant for 6 months (due to nobody wanting to work out of the big towns most likely). Where I was offered $52-55 in Big Towns this job gave me 4-10s as a "manager" in a pharmacy that did about 40 scripts/day for about $60. The other two shifts were covered by local hospital workers. This location, I was informed, would probably close in 2 years or so.
I got to work, trained on site by the covering PIC (who would take naps in the afternoons on a stool during the last half of the training) and helped me clean the place up. Inventory was over double what it should have been due to neglect, recordkeeping was abysmal and customers were returning solely out of sheer habit. The quote from the DM was, "Make the pain go away." After about 3 months it was mostly cleaned up due to spending extra hours of applying some TLC, and it became a mediocre store, even if it was impossible to pull a profit. Since then, it has been a low-stress cash-cow job.
Because I don't need a lot, I payed off my student loans the month they were due. There was no 401-k to speak of, so I threw money into an Edward Jones IRA account and bought my first car cash. The next year the company lost two pharmacists and couldn't do a good job hiring any in Big Town, so I made a deal with the DM; work 1-2 days extra a week in Big Town and convert them to vacation time. Since my store was easy to cover with the two hospital pharmacists able to work the full week, I was pulling in 20 hours PTO most weeks. I used it to follow the advice from my second IPPE rotation and went to Eastern Europe and picked out a nice thin 19 y/o polygot and wifed her up. It's been interesting having all my inlaws in Germany, Ukraine and Russia.
Going over to Europe a total of about 3 months of that year I met a lot of Old Men who were doing the same thing and made a lot of new friends in all part of the USA and the world, even got myself into a documentary about it. One of the best connections I made was my financial adviser who I still talk to once a week and visit occasionally in FL, who got us set up to retire very nicely when I get to be 60 and have more money coming in than what I am making today from annuities. My wifey and I have been married about a year now and things are still awesome. Living fairly frugally, we can still square away $1500 a month after a car loan and retirement is contributed to. The tax refund exceeded 7k, so I'm excited about that.
The problem coming up is that this cash-cow store, after about 4 years of working it, is looking like it's going to close. Working for this company has never been a feasible long-term goal. After two years with the first DM, the position has been reoccupied so many times I just refer to them by their order of presence (currently on DM #6). As I strongly suspect that in the next 9 months this position will be eliminated, my wife and I are trying to consider our priorities in life and prepare ourselves accordingly. She has not yet gotten her green card (SOONtm) or an (American) college degree.
TLDR: I've gotten to live life on my own terms but the status quo is soon to change, so I want insight from those older/smarter than me. Hey, it's been working so far!
Our priorities are:
Caring for our aging parents/grandparents (monetarily)
Spending lots of quality time together (working 4-10s/3-12s/7on7off)
Living very close to where we work (bicycling distance)
College close by (girl cannot drive well)
Children in the next 3-5 years
Other things we consider:
Living close to a major airport (convenience for visiting family)
Ethnically homogenous (MIL is a German immigration worker, they're seeing exactly how "diversity" works out, so sad!)
If we were to live outside 1 hour of a major city it would have to pay Really Well (200k or more)
If we could work at the same institution, e.g. wife being a tech (not likely b/c of policies) or a Resp. Therapist, etc
Right now I've got a few things in the mix. The local hospital (+100 bed?) has a new daytime opening for a pharmacist, and since I've already "managing" two of their staff and living in the same town that's all the references I probably need, so I put in an app for that. They'll eventually have a 7on7off nighttime position too, but I'm less wild about that. I could also do some rural hospital PIC position in another state, a nice 30 hour/week gig, but I'd have to step up my game and learn a lot of stuff before I could feel confident going for that position.
Infusion pharmacy seems interesting, but most of it seems like prep/med review/verification, so maybe if I liked the workplace. If I really wanted to apply myself, I could train for Nuclear Pharmacy, but I haven't thought in that direction for a while. I read on this forum someone had started their own at-home MTM company which my wife could help me do. Starting a consulting business wouldn't probably work with my under-30 youthful features/experience. I could even switch careers entirely or combine it with something else, like computer programming. If worse comes to worse, I could be happy working 2 days a week PRN, although the wife wouldn't like the budget cut.
We know there may not be a perfect job for us out there, but I'm posting this so that I can get some insight and be exposed to other opinions/options. Thanks for reading!
