Failed out of pharmacy school one year before graduation

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Ara2116

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I was just notified a few hours ago that I have been kicked out of school due to poor academic standing. What are my options at this point?

I was in a 0-6 school so I don't have my bachelors and my gpa is not good.

I truly loved studying pharmacy and I was doing well until these last three semesters. This is 100% my own fault because I did not deal well with the stress. Mentally, I have also been dealing with depression and anxiety.

Right now I am thinking about getting a bachelor's, redoing and pharmacy school prerequisites that no longer apply due to time limits, and taking the PCATS. I wouldn't consider going back into pharmacy school if I didn't think I could do it, but I can with a second chance. I'm also considering PA. I want to stay in healthcare and I love pharmacy, but is it worth it to go through school all over again considering the oversaturation?

What would you guys do in my position? I'm sorry this post is all over the place, I literally just found out and I haven't done much research on how I could proceed. I feel heartsick about this.

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I was just notified a few hours ago that I have been kicked out of school due to poor academic standing. What are my options at this point?

I was in a 0-6 school so I don't have my bachelors and my gpa is not good.

I truly loved studying pharmacy and I was doing well until these last three semesters. This is 100% my own fault because I did not deal well with the stress. Mentally, I have also been dealing with depression and anxiety.

Right now I am thinking about getting a bachelor's, redoing and pharmacy school prerequisites that no longer apply due to time limits, and taking the PCATS. I wouldn't consider going back into pharmacy school if I didn't think I could do it, but I can with a second chance. I'm also considering PA. I want to stay in healthcare and I love pharmacy, but is it worth it to go through school all over again considering the oversaturation?

What would you guys do in my position? I'm sorry this post is all over the place, I literally just found out and I haven't done much research on how I could proceed. I feel heartsick about this.
Caribbean medical school?
 
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Convert bad grades to W's and transfer to another school.
 
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Did you even make it to the "professional" years or did you just mess up in years 1 or 2?

Poor performance in years 1 or 2 might be forgiven provided you remediate with better grades, far less so for poor performance in actual pharmacy coursework.

Edit: Never mind. I don't see why any program would take you if you were one year from graduating. Very long odds. Of the few people I know who failed out, none of them were re-admitted by another program.
 
is it different for other schools? i've never even heard of anybody failing out of the last year. the 6th year is pretty much a formality. rotations for half a year, then bs easy to pass classes to coast through for the second half. the 3rd-4th year was when most people got kicked out
 
Depends how serious your preceptors are for rotations. Rotations were no joke at my school. People fail if they do not meet expectations
 
Sorry to hear that but It's very clear that pharmacy if not for you, accept it and move on to another career. You can't get that far and get kicked out. Things happen for a reason, I believe God has a better plan for you.

If you were so depressed and couldn't bare the stress of your pharmacy program you should have considered withdrawing and get yourself together and come back the following year and finish up your last year rather than staying and getting kicked out. Idk if your school allows this but I know some pharmacy schools can let you withdraw and come back the following year.

You should also be aware that you have just wasted 3 years of your life with over 100k in loans without accomplishing anything so it won't be worth it going over everything or even getting into another health field cuz you will still be getting into debt.

Have you considered doing something else besides something in the healthcare field? Maybe you should consider getting a bachelors degree in an IT field and get some certifications? That should take you about 2 years with less loans and you can still make 6 figures. Just my 2 cents. Good luck!
 
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^ things do not need to happen "for a reason". **** happens. You got to deal with it. It is going to be a long, hard road. Snap out of it and do something about it.


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Depends how serious your preceptors are for rotations. Rotations were no joke at my school. People fail if they do not meet expectations

damn. so it's not enough that they got you working for them for free, they gotta give you crap while they doing it. that's some evil stuff
 
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Appeal for retroactive medical withdrawal, go to court if they deny it
 
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Caribbean medical school?
Sooooo, no one's gonna tackle the absurdity of sending this kid off to a Caribbean med school? He couldn't even handle pharmacy school academically, I highly doubt he'll survive the Darwinist bloodbath that is Caribbean med. This is especially true if the OP is suffering from depression and anxiety.
 
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Sooooo, no one's gonna tackle the absurdity of sending this kid off to a Caribbean med school? He couldn't even handle pharmacy school academically, I highly doubt he'll survive the Darwinist bloodbath that is Caribbean med. This is especially true if the OP is suffering from depression and anxiety.

All I know is that nobody from my pharmacy school's pre-med program got into medical school in the USA, but had a "100% med school acceptance rate" thanks to the Caribbean (as of my graduation).


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All I know is that nobody from my pharmacy school's pre-med program got into medical school in the USA, but had a "100% med school acceptance rate" thanks to the Caribbean (as of my graduation).
Sounds lovely. But OP failed out of an American pharmacy school. And from the sounds of it, he was given three semesters to fix his grades. If he couldn't pull it together after all those chances, I really worry about his ability to get through a healthcare-related professional program.

Look at the medical forums on this site. When it comes to American vs Caribbean schools, the overwhelming consensus is that American medical schools give students chances to correct themselves while Caribbean schools will kick students to the curb the minute they start to fail. OP is going to end up failing again if he goes to the Caribbeans.

I would highly recommend OP to not even think about Caribbean med.
 
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^ things do not need to happen "for a reason". **** happens. You got to deal with it. It is going to be a long, hard road. Snap out of it and do something about it.


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1466891267183.jpg
 
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I was just notified a few hours ago that I have been kicked out of school due to poor academic standing. What are my options at this point?

I was in a 0-6 school so I don't have my bachelors and my gpa is not good.

I truly loved studying pharmacy and I was doing well until these last three semesters. This is 100% my own fault because I did not deal well with the stress. Mentally, I have also been dealing with depression and anxiety.

Right now I am thinking about getting a bachelor's, redoing and pharmacy school prerequisites that no longer apply due to time limits, and taking the PCATS. I wouldn't consider going back into pharmacy school if I didn't think I could do it, but I can with a second chance. I'm also considering PA. I want to stay in healthcare and I love pharmacy, but is it worth it to go through school all over again considering the oversaturation?

What would you guys do in my position? I'm sorry this post is all over the place, I literally just found out and I haven't done much research on how I could proceed. I feel heartsick about this.

Physician assistant programs are much more competitive to get into relative to pharmD programs in 2016. If you are going to do pharmD over again don't waste your money on a 0-6. Do 1 year at CC for the prereqs (chem 1, chem 2, bio 1 bio 2 organic chem 1 organic chem 2 microecon, microbio, speech, English 1, ect) then do a 3 year pharmD program. If you are an individual that is prone to depression/anxiety pharmacy is not for you. Not only will you have to be a positive Type A aggressive individual to secure a 40 hour job in retail but the customers will destroy your psyche with their tenacious and never ending complains about insurance/poor service/cost of meds.

You should consider rad. tech, nurse tech, nurse, blood tech, CT tech, xray tech, nuclear tech. PA school is more intense than pharmacy school from what i hear.
 
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To the OP: You have my empathy. I am sorry that you weren't successful in your program. I wish you success in learning to cope with your stress and anxiety, and hope you can overcome your depression. That being said, it's time I got something off my chest.

Every May/June, the admissions office at my school receives 25+ requests from students to "transfer" into our program after having just failed out of another one.
Y'all need to stop. Please. Stop.

It is in your school's best interest for you to graduate- it helps your program's graduation rate, the on-time graduation rate, and adds another alumni to the rolls.
If your school has dismissed you for academics (or has dismissed you for practically any reason), it tells me all I need to know.

If you were just dismissed: I don't want to read about the reasons why you weren't successful. I don't want to read about the struggles you faced, and how you almost overcame them. I don't want to hear about how you barely missed passing that course, and the professor wasn't fair with you. I don't want to read how your school wasn't a good fit for you, or that you were homesick. I don't want to read about why you think you deserve a second chance. YOU JUST FAILED OUT- What could possibly change in the next 2-3 months that would make you successful should you enroll in my program this fall? NOTHING, and you'll never convince me otherwise.

Your best bet is to be readmitted at your own school; you should spend your time and efforts there.

If you insist on trying to transfer to a different program: know that you have an uphill battle. However, I have rolled the dice on a few folks who I thought deserved a second chance at pharmacy school, and I have not been disappointed. [It should also be noted that these are individuals who are essentially starting over at year one; hardly anybody transfers with advanced status.]

I'm not going to tell you what you need to do in your application- I don't want to lay a blueprint for everyone to follow and see the number of transfer requests balloon to 100/year (and have them look compelling too)- but your application should come after a suitable length of time has passed since you were dismissed (we are talking YEARS, not months)- you need time to work on the issues that led you to fail out in the first place.

Best of luck
 
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Appeal for retroactive medical withdrawal, go to court if they deny it
If I were you, I would try to fight this as hard as a I could just because of all of the work you've done and the loans you most likely have. You have to be honest with yourself about whether or not you really think you can complete the program and do well in the field. If yes, pull out all the stops. Get psychiatric help if you need it. There's absolutely no shame.
 
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Thank you guys so much for all your advice! It was really helpful.
 
damn. so it's not enough that they got you working for them for free, they gotta give you crap while they doing it. that's some evil stuff
true rotations are not "working for free" - they are preceptors who challenge you to learn - at least in my setting there is very little I could actually have a student do for me that I wouldn't need to review - which takes longer than if I do it myself. Residents - on the other hand, are my little grunts
 
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true rotations are not "working for free" - they are preceptors who challenge you to learn - at least in my setting there is very little I could actually have a student do for me that I wouldn't need to review - which takes longer than if I do it myself. Residents - on the other hand, are my little grunts
My few retail rotations were just free tech work. One independent place heard I worked in an IV room and had me draw up flu shots all day for a clinic they had scheduled the next day. Real education they gave me there!

I had a few hospital rotations that actually let me learn a lot. It was just frustrating dealing with rotations where they either didn't really want you there or they just wanted to exploit you.
 
true rotations are not "working for free" - they are preceptors who challenge you to learn - at least in my setting there is very little I could actually have a student do for me that I wouldn't need to review - which takes longer than if I do it myself. Residents - on the other hand, are my little grunts

how many "true rotations" did you have in school? Out of 9 sites, maybe only 1 for me and that preceptor was an actual professor at the school working in a drug info center. rest was "package the meds, organize the rxs, make the shelves look nice"
 
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how many "true rotations" did you have in school? Out of 9 sites, maybe only 1 for me and that preceptor was an actual professor at the school working in a drug info center. rest was "package the meds, organize the rxs, make the shelves look nice"
7 out of my 9 were true rotations
the other two make you realize life isn't fair and you have to suck it up and deal with it
 
i work with several - they are not great, but they seem to do a decent job
Work with several what? Medical school Caribbean graduates?

I'm not speaking about the result of the Carib med schools- generally if you can make it through the gauntlet you're a proficient physician. However, the issue is making it through with all of the nonsense: insane tuition, a lot of terrible rotations and most importantly: the ridiculously low chance of matching upon graduation. There's a huge issue with the IMG match into the US, and it's only to inflate as more US medical schools are opened and the federal budget- which funds residency programs- remains stagnant. A bottleneck situation has already begun, and they'll be cutting loose the IMG/FMG folks first.
 
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Work with several what? Medical school Caribbean graduates?

I'm not speaking about the result of the Carib med schools- generally if you can make it through the gauntlet you're a proficient physician. However, the issue is making it through with all of the nonsense: insane tuition, a lot of terrible rotations and most importantly: the ridiculously low chance of matching upon graduation. There's a huge issue with the IMG match into the US, and it's only to inflate as more US medical schools are opened and the federal budget- which funds residency programs- remains stagnant. A bottleneck situation has already begun, and they'll be cutting loose the IMG/FMG folks first.
yes - work with several - those issues you mention I have no experience with - so will take your work on it
 
yes - work with several - those issues you mention I have no experience with - so will take your work on it
Here's a thread for you via SDN:

6% of USMD students, 20% of USDO students, and 46% of USIMGs went UN-matched

Those lucky 50% of Caribbean med students who matched are the ones who survived the culls at every step. I hear over 50% of Caribbean med students fail out their first year. And it only gets harder from there. I think 60%-70% of the original entering class remains after the first two years. Even less remain after the third and fourth years (not sure about the numbers).


That means OP has anywhere from 20-40% chance of remaining in med school til graduation if he goes to the Caribbean. Then he has a 50% chance of matching into residency.

From my experience, the majority of people who succeeded in the Caribbean were the children of physicians. Their parents could foot the expensive bill, and provide them with unlimited material and monetary support.

OP is gonna get royally screwed if he thinks he can just enter one of these programs and become a physician.
I'll look into it, thank you. Being an MD never appealed to me but it doesn't hurt to look at all options.
Don't do it OP. Go RN/BSN, then go for a NP. Those are all affordable options at state schools.

 
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dude just go PA or NP...specialize into CRNA and make bank. No need for all this bs. I'm sure you can do all that with less debt than most pharmacy schools right now.
 
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This data is only for the ACGME match (MD & DO), and not the AOA (DO).
In a few years they'll be merging into one residency accreditation system.
I thought the AOA system was strictly limited to DO students.

I tried to internet sleuth/google search how many IMG's matched into the AOA system, but I can't find any info, even from the official website.

Plus the AOA's 3300 residency spots will unlikely change the IMG match rate stats drastically. DO schools put out 5000 graduates this year. I can't imagine a lot of AOA spots left over for IMGs (even if they offered it). I know a lot of DO students study both COMLEX and USMLE so they can apply for ACGME or AOA or both (is that legal?)
Outcomes and Trends in the AOA Match

Sooooooo....... unless IMGs are getting AOA residency spots in droves (VERY UNLIKELY), I think the stats in my previous post are pretty telling of the bleakness of going Caribbean. A real battle of the bastards if you ask me.

EDIT: forget to mention that the ACGME residency spots number at 30,ooo. So that's why the AOA's 3,300 spots is really not a game changer.
 
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dude just go PA or NP...specialize into CRNA and make bank. No need for all this bs. I'm sure you can do all that with less debt than most pharmacy schools right now.
getting into CRNA school is no easy task
 
To the OP: You have my empathy. I am sorry that you weren't successful in your program. I wish you success in learning to cope with your stress and anxiety, and hope you can overcome your depression. That being said, it's time I got something off my chest.

Every May/June, the admissions office at my school receives 25+ requests from students to "transfer" into our program after having just failed out of another one.
Y'all need to stop. Please. Stop.

It is in your school's best interest for you to graduate- it helps your program's graduation rate, the on-time graduation rate, and adds another alumni to the rolls.
If your school has dismissed you for academics (or has dismissed you for practically any reason), it tells me all I need to know.

If you were just dismissed: I don't want to read about the reasons why you weren't successful. I don't want to read about the struggles you faced, and how you almost overcame them. I don't want to hear about how you barely missed passing that course, and the professor wasn't fair with you. I don't want to read how your school wasn't a good fit for you, or that you were homesick. I don't want to read about why you think you deserve a second chance. YOU JUST FAILED OUT- What could possibly change in the next 2-3 months that would make you successful should you enroll in my program this fall? NOTHING, and you'll never convince me otherwise.

I completely agree with 297point1's first point, especially if you are a state school, there's a major accountability problem with the university academic administration if your pharmacy school fails students indiscriminately. The tuition paid is quite a bit less than it costs the state to educate pharmacists, so any failure is a waste of the taxpayer's money (and a possible pharmacist taxpayer.). Let's just say that if a class has a 10% attrition rate (15 students) for the four professional years, that's about $500k that the university provost is going to have the pharmacy dean's head for if not addressed. The hardest part of pharmacy school should have been the admission, once in, we (the school, the faculty, the clinical sites) have every expectation that students succeed through the program and on the licensing exams. I know that the adcoms for my alma mater and every school I've been associated with gets the CTJ meeting about when in doubt, reject as we don't want to waste either their time or our resources. And if you wonder why we don't make it too easy and guarantee that we pass 100% through the school, actually pharmacy schools before Flexner used to do that too. That's why there's an independent examination process for the license even after the end of the apprenticeships.

I'm a little more lenient (and so is my top 10 state school now and my shake and bake alma mater) on the second point that the adcom and faculty know of general circumstances where we'd consider a failed student elsewhere at a state school if we know what the problem was. I'll give a direct example. Iowa until about 2005 had an infamous reputation in the Big 10 for their pharmaceutical sciences faculty beating up their the professional program students (the med chem and pharmacokinetics class under a well meaning but strict grading professor weeded out 10-20% in some years). If it was for reasons where we knew the situation, the grades were generally good except for the pharmacokinetics class, we'd give a provisional acceptance to them. I also take my hat off to anyone who was a grad of Iowa from that generation as I know that even taking a D pass in Schoenwald's class is no mean feat.

However, if transfers under failure never get through in a school, the associate dean for academic affairs within the pharmacy school or the provost/VP over the general university admissions ought to look into revising the standard so that the overburdened faculty don't have to read junk applications. I hear you 297point1 that I read far, far too many applications (new and transfer applications both) that should have never left the student services office.

Students past the 2011 reforms all have a much more standardized curriculum than the older generation which really predicated on who was around (anyone else had Pharmacognosy as a required class purely because our med chemist was a diehard Ole Miss alumni?!) or had more toxicology at Temple due to Doukas?. There are also those who are the year-round integrated systems approach that may work better at the semester isolated subjects methods and vice-versa. If you're applying to another pharmacy school after failing, I would also make it a point to emphasize why the environment may be different and better this time around. Of course though, you have to communicate why you failed and if how that is changeable showing up here.

But failure is something where the applicant does not get the benefit of the doubt. In the OP's specific case, if the op really understands the reasons, there's some soul searching about the other options. There are other medical careers; there are other careers period, but you're still going to have to work at it to make the career work for you. At least no one mentioned law or MBA school (both schools at my state school are admitting fewer and having real accreditation trouble over the employment statistics). You'll need to match your ambitions to your circumstances.
 
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There are other medical careers; there are other careers period, but you're still going to have to work at it to make the career work for you. At least no one mentioned law or MBA school (both schools at my state school are admitting fewer and having real accreditation trouble over the employment statistics). You'll need to match your ambitions to your circumstances.
Not to derail this thread too far but have applications to the pharmacy program at your state school decreased? A deluge of pharmacy schools have opened up in the last 15 years. Combo that with decreasing job prospects, and many people have chosen to go to medical, dental, and nursing programs over pharmacy. According to the AACP, application numbers have decreased below even year 2000 numbers for some schools.

AACP Student Trend Data

Do you guys have any issues with accreditation? I know schools cook the books with residency, but that can't last forever.
 
Physician assistant programs are much more competitive to get into relative to pharmD programs in 2016.

You should consider rad. tech, nurse tech, nurse, blood tech, CT tech, xray tech, nuclear tech. PA school is more intense than pharmacy school from what i hear.

This 100%. If OP is still around, go for these jobs. Then think about PA (if possible). While PharmD programs have a 4:1 application-to-matriculation ratio (and a nationwide applicant-to-seat ratio close to 1:1), PA programs have anywhere around 30:1 to 20:1 application-to-matriculation ratio (and a total applicant-to-seat ratio being somewhere around 2:5). Some SDNer's claim that it's harder to get into a PA program than a DO program (not sure if that's true, but some posters on SDN make that claim.)

The GPA requirements are definitely higher for PA school (Average 3.65) than PharmD (Anywhere from 3.5 to do you have a pulse?).

Also think about going BSN at the state college, then going NP at the state college while working as a PRN/PT/FT nurse. More affordable than some PA programs out there.
 
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Not to derail this thread too far but have applications to the pharmacy program at your state school decreased? A deluge of pharmacy schools have opened up in the last 15 years. Combo that with decreasing job prospects, and many people have chosen to go to medical, dental, and nursing programs over pharmacy. According to the AACP, application numbers have decreased below even year 2000 numbers for some schools.

AACP Student Trend Data

Do you guys have any issues with accreditation? I know schools cook the books with residency, but that can't last forever.

No, we've not seen a decrease as we're the only state school and there are no private schools. Same for the other school I have the affiliation with where there are two state schools and no private schools. Our quality standards have dropped for sure, the class admission statistics were statistically weaker the last two years than from 2011-2013 (I haven't seen the ACPE data in quite a while, but that's a probable trend). (Personal pet peeve: I hate the stats focused admissions as I think we haven't given enough influence to working habits over study ones. I'm much more willing to favor credible paid experience in the health-care field and average stats over high stats and volunteering as I've seen what happens in general to those where pharmacy is their first actual job.)

Our medicine colleagues have a HUGE increase in applications, and I consider the admits lately to be qualitatively more enthusiastic than most with the limited interaction. The prospects are also less for their residencies due to a much more limited expansion than the expansion of admits, so they do have to work harder than in the past, though residency has humanized their hours as ACGME's been pretty nasty about enforcing caps.

Do you guys have any issues with accreditation?
I'm going with mu as the answer as the question is contextually not answerable. Accreditation visits are kind of like a state board inspection of your retail pharmacy or JC of your hospitals. There's ALWAYS issues. Now, no one in any of the faculties have any major concern that we'd be put on probation or have our status change, but the audits are still nervewracking. Think of accreditation like basically the consultant that allows you to do the dirty things that you couldn't do otherwise like cut programs, reassign faculty, reprioritize budgets...It's an excuse for overhaul as well. So we fear those inspections as more an academic management incentive to screw us 'defenseless' faculty over. For the chair, it's a blessing in disguise when ACPE has major concerns as you're less limited about what you can do to your department if you have some external organization supporting reform. The external organization doesn't necessarily supports the chair-inspired reforms, just the reforms which that annoying detail gets swept under the rug.

This is not the party line due to my day job involvement in trying to fix that area in DoE/DoL. Pharmacy schools don't 'cook' the books with residency, that's an openly acknowledged part of the statistics where one year and five year have to be reported for that reason. No one considers the one-year terribly accurate for a school anymore, but the five-year is considered consequential and damning if the number is low. But, the failures are tracked annually by the state as well as basically we have to report those as losses. But how to capture incomplete FTE employment (a chain only offers 32 hours a week of work, patchwork FTE where someone has to patch together 24 +16 elsewhere and has benefits at neither company), that's something the labor and industrial economists are trying to figure out in our profession as it's well-known (except to APhA apparently) that our forecasts are far off. The sharing economy is the new ruthless economy with a better PR name.
 
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No, we've not seen a decrease as we're the only state school and there are no private schools. Same for the other school I have the affiliation with where there are two state schools and no private schools. Our quality standards have dropped for sure, the class admission statistics were statistically weaker the last two years than from 2011-2013 (I haven't seen the ACPE data in quite a while, but that's a probable trend). (Personal pet peeve: I hate the stats focused admissions as I think we haven't given enough influence to working habits over study ones. I'm much more willing to favor credible paid experience in the health-care field and average stats over high stats and volunteering as I've seen what happens in general to those where pharmacy is their first actual job.)

Our medicine colleagues have a HUGE increase in applications, and I consider the admits lately to be qualitatively more enthusiastic than most with the limited interaction. The prospects are also less for their residencies due to a much more limited expansion than the expansion of admits, so they do have to work harder than in the past, though residency has humanized their hours as ACGME's been pretty nasty about enforcing caps.


I'm going with mu as the answer as the question is contextually not answerable. Accreditation visits are kind of like a state board inspection of your retail pharmacy or JC of your hospitals. There's ALWAYS issues. Now, no one in any of the faculties have any major concern that we'd be put on probation or have our status change, but the audits are still nervewracking. Think of accreditation like basically the consultant that allows you to do the dirty things that you couldn't do otherwise like cut programs, reassign faculty, reprioritize budgets...It's an excuse for overhaul as well. So we fear those inspections as more an academic management incentive to screw us 'defenseless' faculty over. For the chair, it's a blessing in disguise when ACPE has major concerns as you're less limited about what you can do to your department if you have some external organization supporting reform. The external organization doesn't necessarily supports the chair-inspired reforms, just the reforms which that annoying detail gets swept under the rug.

This is not the party line due to my day job involvement in trying to fix that area in DoE/DoL. Pharmacy schools don't 'cook' the books with residency, that's an openly acknowledged part of the statistics where one year and five year have to be reported for that reason. No one considers the one-year terribly accurate for a school anymore, but the five-year is considered consequential and damning if the number is low. But, the failures are tracked annually by the state as well as basically we have to report those as losses. But how to capture incomplete FTE employment (a chain only offers 32 hours a week of work, patchwork FTE where someone has to patch together 24 +16 elsewhere and has benefits at neither company), that's something the labor and industrial economists are trying to figure out in our profession as it's well-known (except to APhA apparently) that our forecasts are far off. The sharing economy is the new ruthless economy with a better PR name.

If you don't mind, can you expand on the bolded part? When you say "forecasts," are you referring to the predictions from ~10+ years ago that pharmacists would become more central healthcare providers and all that?
 
Our quality standards have dropped for sure, the class admission statistics were statistically weaker the last two years than from 2011-2013 (I haven't seen the ACPE data in quite a while, but that's a probable trend).

Pharmacy schools don't 'cook' the books with residency, that's an openly acknowledged part of the statistics where one year and five year have to be reported for that reason. No one considers the one-year terribly accurate for a school anymore, but the five-year is considered consequential and damning if the number is low. But, the failures are tracked annually by the state as well as basically we have to report those as losses. But how to capture incomplete FTE employment (a chain only offers 32 hours a week of work, patchwork FTE where someone has to patch together 24 +16 elsewhere and has benefits at neither company), that's something the labor and industrial economists are trying to figure out in our profession as it's well-known (except to APhA apparently) that our forecasts are far off.

Very good post. Life is definitely better in a state without private pharmacy schools. I can't imagine living in a state like Tennessee and Ohio, where the expansion in schools just doesn't make any sense.

Didn't know about the five-year stats. Interesting.

About my last post. I mentioned residency as 'cooking' the books. I meant this in respect to employment stats pharmacy schools put on their websites. The only job stats I've seen on these webpages have been 6-month post-grad surveys. It always seems odd to me that some schools group hospital employment with residency on these surveys (both combined is around 20-30% of respondents).

In contrast, surveys in which they separate hospital employment from residencies, hospital employment hovers around 1-3%, while residency is around 20-25%. I've felt it was kinda dishonest when schools group the two together because residency is a training program and not a professional employment like a clinical or staff hospital pharmacist.
 
If you don't mind, can you expand on the bolded part? When you say "forecasts," are you referring to the predictions from ~10+ years ago that pharmacists would become more central healthcare providers and all that?

Not quite. There's two levels of statistics:

1. The US Department of Labor has a specific obligation in conjunction with the Selective Service to enumerate every single health care professional and whether they are in active practice or not including women. This includes basically any of the health professions, but when you apply for a license in any state, much of the reason why the data collection is standardized is due to requirements for reporting to the Selective Service's Health Care Personnel Delivery System. https://www.sss.gov/About/Medical-Draft-in-Standby-Mode. For medicine, there's some differentation involved which the labor economists work with AMA and AOA on to at least separate primary care providers and general surgeons. Pharmacy is treated as a catch-all still, and if this system is ever activated, the roles that we are assigned to are more textbook pharmacist in nature (basic hospital, basic long-term care, and basic community/retail). The reason for the reporting of where you work is to get a census of this, so the planners can make general estimates of who is working where and how many providers of this sort can be made available through this system. So, when you get your license, unless you are already part of the uniformed services (including USPHS), you're put on that HCPDS list until some age in case there's a particular need to get a bunch of us somewhere and organized fast. These statistics are not very well kept for pharmacy because there are two groups of pharmacists (the ones that graduated between 75 and 82 and the ones at present) who nominally keep their licenses but do not work due to job unavailability or family concerns. So, simply counting active licenses per SSN doesn't work, they need to figure out how many of us actually engage in practice as well as being licensed. These statistics for reasons discussed on the boards and including family leave to have children make available on paper more pharmacists than actually practice. On the other hand, the reserve pool of pharmacists is big enough that chains have used data from this system to figure out what the overages are in areas. The HCPDS system is not active at this point, but the data collection is implemented for a day when we'll need it. While we're waiting, we do want to improve our collection processes and try to figure out unused labor pools. There's also interest from the Department of Homeland Security about getting this system more accurate as well for their own intentions. Forecasts for the HCPDS is 90% of what I'm concerned about when I refer to forecasts, not the half baked ones the societies make. These numbers feed back to the Department of Education for estimations on how many PharmD loans should they be seeing and whether increases are expected or not based on the current license census and the active practitioner list. For the Department of Labor, they have a small influence on how the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services allocates the medical training budget. For the day to day pharmacist, I'm sure you've never heard of the fed involvement nor even the fact that the HCPDS system exists. That's well and good for all of us; I hope the feds never activate that system fully.

2. There's a different level beyond that which works with Department of Justice and Department of Energy on who has acquisition authority for Scheduled substances, but also regulated chemicals in manufacturing. So, they want to basically know who among us actually uses the ordering authority, so that they are monitored and trained properly. There's tight oversight down to the invoice level for Schedule II's as most of us deal with on a weekly basis, but there's also the matter of trying to source those regulated chemicals and their distribution channels at present. While many pharmacists have the legal authority to put themselves in a position to purchase them for patient dispensing, there's quotas nationally that are divided among the states and patient bases. http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/quotas/quota_history.pdf. Yes, the controlled substances legal distribution market is a textbook Soviet-style command economy where the DEA sets strict policies on how much of these substances may be imported or manufactured which is passed down from manufacture to wholesaler to pharmacy to patient. The Department of Justice forecasts the number of pharmacists serving patients for a much different reason, in general the fewer the pharmacists around per capita, oddly enough, the more variable the amount that the oversight area purchases. We're getting to the point where it's possible to coordinate the State PDMP programs with the DEA quotas to give the manufacturers and wholesalers better planning data.

Without giving away my brand of politics, let's just say that the implementation of 1 and 2 is what you would expect for a large bureaucracy to do, and when it fails, it fails the profession really badly when planning. For the first, it's hard to figure out how to really summarize the profession right now as it's hard to figure out how many out there now have nontraditional working arrangements (not FT or PT by the normal definition). From my peon cheap seats, it's an entertaining problem to deal with, but its not academic to me as I do want some happy medium between genuine employment and patient safety.
 
I really think Zelman was being sarcastic about Caribbean Medical School--I'm surprised so many people are taking his suggestion seriously (but perhaps good, since the OP may be taking his suggestion seriously.)

You should also be aware that you have just wasted 3 years of your life with over 100k in loans without accomplishing anything so it won't be worth it going over everything or even getting into another health field cuz you will still be getting into debt.

Actually OP said he was going to a 0 - 6 yr school, so s/he's wasted 5 years of her/his life without a degree and most likely a huge amount of debt.


OP, I know nobody likes to hear this, but if you failed out of pharmacy school, the most likely reason is that pharmacy school is too difficult for you. And probably any healthcare field. I find it unlikely that your grades suddenly tanked in year 4 & year 5 of pharmacy school--more likely you were a marginal, barely passing student all along, and as the material got harder, you couldn't keep up with it. There is no shame in this, everyone has different strengths in different areas, and that makes our society the wonderful varied society that it is.

Your best bet, find a school that will accept as many of your credits as possible--with luck you should be able to get at least 2 full years credit. Next, think about where your strengths are (because it seems unlikely they are in science)--think about degrees that require classes that play to your strengths. Meet with a career adviser at your new college and plan out a schedule to get your BS degree (this issue here might be money, depending on how much debt/loans you already have.) Get your BS degree and then get a job.

If a few years down the line, you really miss pharmacy school (unlikely), then sign up for some science classes at your local community college & see how you do. But at this point, you've been in school for 5 years with no degree, you just need to get a degree and start working.
 
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7 out of my 9 were true rotations
the other two make you realize life isn't fair and you have to suck it up and deal with it
Drug info was the most boring rotation ever. I was at a major research university and the "drug information center" consisted of 4 computers and a broke ass bookshelf. Sorry but being the hospital bitch and reading primary literature all day is not interesting.
 
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Drug info was the most boring rotation ever. I was at a major research university and the "drug information center" consisted of 4 computers and a broke ass bookshelf. Sorry but being the hospital bitch and reading primary literature all day is not interesting.
work isn't always interesting
 
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dude just go PA or NP...specialize into CRNA and make bank. No need for all this bs. I'm sure you can do all that with less debt than most pharmacy schools right now.

You have to have a BSN before becoming a CRNA or NP.
 
I'm a little more lenient (and so is my top 10 state school now and my shake and bake alma mater) on the second point that the adcom and faculty know of general circumstances where we'd consider a failed student elsewhere at a state school if we know what the problem was. I'll give a direct example. Iowa until about 2005 had an infamous reputation in the Big 10 for their pharmaceutical sciences faculty beating up their the professional program students (the med chem and pharmacokinetics class under a well meaning but strict grading professor weeded out 10-20% in some years). If it was for reasons where we knew the situation, the grades were generally good except for the pharmacokinetics class, we'd give a provisional acceptance to them. I also take my hat off to anyone who was a grad of Iowa from that generation as I know that even taking a D pass in Schoenwald's class is no mean feat.

Hawkeye grad here.

I don't remember Schoenwald at all, although his CV looks like he was there at the time. Maybe he taught graduate students? Anyway, the prof we had had a similar reputation, and we didn't put our names on the tests either because he didn't like women in pharmacy. :boom: :wtf: We were identified by SSN.
 
Drug info was the most boring rotation ever. I was at a major research university and the "drug information center" consisted of 4 computers and a broke ass bookshelf. Sorry but being the hospital bitch and reading primary literature all day is not interesting.

My BFF did a nuclear pharmacy rotation. That sounded like the most boring thing of all.
 
You have to have a BSN before becoming a CRNA or NP.

An RN can be obtained in 20-24 months via a diploma program or a community college. That allows one to begin working right away as an RN, making $50k+/yr. From there, an online RN-BSN completion program can be completed in 9-18 months, depending on the program. Where I'm from, each year at community college is about $2-3k. WGU has an acceptable RN-BSN program which can absolutely be completed in 1 year (2 six month terms) for a total cost of about $7k. So, getting from zero to BSN can cost as little as $11-14k in tuition and be done in under 3 years, at least one of which can be done while making a professional level income working 3-4 days per week. If that year is spent working in the ICU, one could then apply to a CRNA program pretty much as soon as completing the BSN. NP programs don't have that same requirement for ICU experience (I don't know of any that do.)

So, if one has hustle, getting from where OP is into a career as an advanced practice RN is achievable and can begin to be quite lucrative, even during the education process. Working as a new grad RN isn't going to pay as well as pharmacy would (in most markets,) but that isn't an option that is still on the table for OP. There are a wide range of jobs under the umbrella of nursing, including nonclinical positions in research and education... if direct patient care isn't your thing.

(It may also be possible for the OP to transfer to a traditional 4 year university and take mostly nursing courses, since likely you've taken most of the non-nursing courses you'd need for the degree. That would tend to be more expensive than doing the Community College / Hospital Based Diploma Program route, and to take more than 2 years in order to get through their BSN curriculum... and for very little benefit. An RN is an RN is an RN. Some hospitals pay BSN's a few cents to a buck more an hour for having their degree, and a few only want to hire BSNs, but for the most part there is no stigma on getting the RN using some 2 year curriculum and then finishing the BSN while working as a nurse, rather than having to plan on another 3-4 years with no income and mounting student debts.)
 
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An RN can be obtained in 20-24 months via a diploma program or a community college. That allows one to begin working right away as an RN, making $50k+/yr. From there, an online RN-BSN completion program can be completed in 9-18 months, depending on the program. Where I'm from, each year at community college is about $2-3k. WGU has an acceptable RN-BSN program which can absolutely be completed in 1 year (2 six month terms) for a total cost of about $7k. So, getting from zero to BSN can cost as little as $11-14k in tuition and be done in under 3 years, at least one of which can be done while making a professional level income working 3-4 days per week. If that year is spent working in the ICU, one could then apply to a CRNA program pretty much as soon as completing the BSN. NP programs don't have that same requirement for ICU experience (I don't know of any that do.)

So, if one has hustle, getting from where OP is into a career as an advanced practice RN is achievable and can begin to be quite lucrative, even during the education process. Working as a new grad RN isn't going to pay as well as pharmacy would (in most markets,) but that isn't an option that is still on the table for OP. There are a wide range of jobs under the umbrella of nursing, including nonclinical positions in research and education... if direct patient care isn't your thing.

(It may also be possible for the OP to transfer to a traditional 4 year university and take mostly nursing courses, since likely you've taken most of the non-nursing courses you'd need for the degree. That would tend to be more expensive than doing the Community College / Hospital Based Diploma Program route, and to take more than 2 years in order to get through their BSN curriculum... and for very little benefit. An RN is an RN is an RN. Some hospitals pay BSN's a few cents to a buck more an hour for having their degree, and a few only want to hire BSNs, but for the most part there is no stigma on getting the RN using some 2 year curriculum and then finishing the BSN while working as a nurse, rather than having to plan on another 3-4 years with no income and mounting student debts.)

Actually, there are more than a few CRNA programs out there that will accept applicants who have a B.S. degree in biology/chemistry/physics and an RN license but no BSN degree. I think that this will change in 2025 when all CRNA programs will be mandated to grant doctorate degrees, but for now, someone with a B.S. degree in bio can do a three-semester ADN/ASN program to get their RN, start working in the ICU, and apply to some CRNA schools as soon as they begin working in the ICU.
 
Isn't the diploma RN being phased out, with the BSN being the default RN degree within a few years?

Chances are, the OP has enough, or nearly enough, general ed credits to cobble together a bachelor's degree of some kind, should s/he transfer to another school for a liberal arts degree.
 
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