I spoke to students at UT and Texas A&M. Thanks for all the responses, everyone.
Since I'm at Texas A&M, I feel a bit obligated to respond.
I know many of my classmates felt that their P1 year was the worst, but I didn't feel that it was that bad. Certainly, there was the pressure of a new environment and the need to adjust to how things work, but it didn't feel particularly overwhelming. I don't mean to say that there weren't any bad weeks. But, I don't feel like I was smothered in my first year.
Several people at A&M have also said that the first semester of the P2 year would be pretty bad because of having to drive off to our weekly rotation sites every Monday. Personally, I had to drive 135 miles to my site (so, a total of 270 miles forwards and back), which as I understand was in the top 5 furthest sites. It certainly added some time-crunch to the week, but the classes that we had weren't too bad (Pharmaceutics and Basic Pharmacokinetics were well-taught and fairly lightweight in the difficulty of the material).
If anything, I would say that the most recent semester has been the roughest for me because of the monumental feeling of senioritis that I've been getting. I think that kinda articulates the importance of your mindset from semester to semester. I have the feeling that a lot of students come into pharmacy school feeling a bit complacent. For a lot of students, acceptance into a school of pharmacy fulfills their primary goal, and so they come into their first semester lacking a certain degree of drive that is needed to prosper. I think that is part of the reason why some students struggle in their first semester.
The other side to why some students struggle in their first semester is that maybe their work in undergraduate school did not prepare them for the rigors of pharmacy school. Quite often, people draw comparisons between 4-year universities and community colleges, but I do not think that such an easy distinction can not be made (for the record, I went to the University of Texas at Austin, and I have taken summer classes and then post-UT classes at a community college). The point remains, though, that some colleges offer a different quality of education. It's hard to measure how well a GPA of 4.0 at one university will compare to a 3.0 at another university. Now, although that argument may be a wash, I think it's still important to consider how a person will view their GPA. Will a person let their 4.0 inflate their ego, even on a subliminal level? Will a person with a 2.8 feel an inferiority complex when surrounded by their peers? Personally, I think the most important thing that I got out of my time in UT-Austin is that I know how to pull an all-nighter, and the idea of a week-to-week time-crunch isn't anything abnormal to me.
I've run into plenty of people in pharmacy school who are, by all intents and purposes, smarter than me. The only reason that I can ascertain as to why their grades aren't as high as mine is that they either don't put enough effort into things, or they have some sort of psychological block that's pulling them for a loop. So, perspective has a lot to do with what semester will be your worst semester. If you want to play it safe, I would try to get into the mentality that every semester is going to be pretty ugly.
On that note, I should probably start reading something.
--Garfield3d
