Continuing my response.
Thanks for the great reply. I was wondering if you could elaborate on what area you focused on e.g. neuroscience, cell biology, etc.
I wound up studying neuroscience. Its really a fascinating field and my pharmacy background helped out a lot in my classes. There were other fields that I was interested in as well, but things just worked out in such a way that I wound up in neuroscience.
Also maybe describe the process - like how long did it take you to get the PhD?
It took me a bit over five years (~5.4 years). I could have done it in less if I made some smarter moves regarding my project, but as they say hindsight is 20/20.
To give a more complete answer people in my class finished anywhere between 4.5 and 7 years. I was right about average.
The process is roughly as follows:
Year 1: You take some classes and do rotations in various labs. Eventually you pick a lab to do your thesis work in.
Year 2: You take more classes, start your thesis work and form a thesis committee. This year is usually when the three big graduate school exams are. The written qualifying exam, the oral qualifying exam and the thesis proposal (a combination of a written document and oral exam).
Classes are just like classes anywhere else but they usually test with essay and short answer questions rather than multiple choice. Some are good, some are bad. Many are team taught so you get the whole continuum of lecture styles from not even worth showing up to mind bogglingly awesome.
During this year you put together a committee. Basically a group of five or so including your mentor who are supposed to guide you through your thesis project and eventual graduation. Sometimes they are helpful, sometimes they are obstructive and sometimes they are just useless.
The written exam was my favorite. Basically if you study a ton, you'll do well. Similar to a board exam. The oral exam and thesis proposal are neither standardized nor fair. Basically your success is determined by your committee. If they are feeling generous, you'll sail through. If they are feeling cranky, you won't.
Year 3+: From this point on you focus on your research. As you get more data you try to publish a paper or two and then when you, your mentor and your committee decide that you've done enough work you give a final defense and you're done. Oddly, this is actually the easiest part of the whole grad school experience.
What was a typical day like for you?
Basically I worked in a lab doing experiments. As for hours, it varies. I like to keep my workload to about 40-50 hours a week. Others worked way into the night. Your mentor and the culture of your lab affects this a lot. Some mentors push their students to work as much as possible, and some don't really care so long as the project is moving forward.
To be honest, despite everyone in graduate school saying how they work 12+ hour days, they usually aren't. Coffee breaks, internet surfing, gym time and naps do not count as time worked.
The nice thing about being in research is that your day is pretty flexible. Waking up late, spending time in the gym, having a lunch, going to a dentist appointment or otherwise having a life is really easy to do so long as you understand the rudiments or time management.
Other things you'll have to deal with in graduate school are weekly lab meetings and journal clubs and semiannual committee meetings.
You mentioned pharmacy to be uninteresting and potentially mundane intellectually - were you intellectually challenged (and satisfied) by teaching/research/courses?
Research runs the gamut from dull to stimulating. As I was starting out learning my field and just getting started everything was really exciting. The honeymoon period in full effect.
Working in a lab basically involves two main activities. Doing experiments and analyzing and writing up data. Doing experiments can be intellectually exciting when they are working and your project is moving forward. However, research being what it is - something no one has ever done before -, lends itself to a high degree of failure. Spending 6 months working on something and never getting it to work gets depressing. Similarly, spending months getting negative data is also depressing. Negative data is essentially unpublishable and thus useless.
I found analyzing data, thinking about my project and writing things up to be much more stimulating than doing experiments. This is where you really get to use your knowledge rather than just working as a technician.
Courses as I mentioned above could be fun or dull, depending on the course.
Teaching and presenting were things that I really enjoyed doing. Trying to put together and deliver a talk that people would be interested in and pay attention to remains my favorite activity in all of graduate school.
Did you receive more satisfaction from the PhD than you did in a pharmacy role?
Kind of depends on how you define satisfaction.
In terms of education - pharmacy school was more satisfying than graduate school. Graduate school was too much of a moving target and that frustrated me. The expectations were never clearly defined and once you figured something out it would change.
To be fair, if you can make it through both programs there will be very little in the biomedical area that you can't easily grasp. This may prove to be a major advantage later on in my career. You'll have to check back with me again in a few years to see if that is the case.
In terms of institutional support - pharmacy school wins. When I was going through pharmacy school I always felt that the the program and most of the faculty wanted everyone to succeed. Even if you were at the bottom of your class they would bend over backwards to help you get past your sticking points and graduate. In graduate school I got the impression that no one really cared if you succeeded or not. If you quit, that was your own fault for not being good enough.
In terms of stress - it's a tie. Pharmacy school will stress out people who can't put their nose to the grindstone and study hard. Graduate school is more of a marathon. If you've got the mental fortitude to plug on despite poor mentorship, angry committees, and failed research you'll get through. If you don't, you'll get depressed and drop out, as many of my classmates did.
In terms of career development - both programs get an F. Pharmacy school only talks about retail, hospital and residencies. Graduate school only talks about academia. Both programs neglect to emphasize, let alone mention, all the other places that the degree could take you.
In terms of career - it depends. If you love research, and partitularly basic science, nothing beats a PhD. If you are interested in more clinically relevent careers then a PhD becomes much less important and the PharmD becomes much more useful.
Given the current economic situation, trying to get a non-dispensing job with a PharmD is neigh impossible. And trying to get a non-academic job with a PhD is also nearly impossible. If you don't want to be a staff pharmacist I would recommend going to graduate school and maybe getting a masters in order to wait for the recovery.
There is also an existential crisis that most graduate students , particularly in the basic sciences, face. Eventually you realaize that you are spending years of your life studying something so obscure that most people's eyes glaze over when you start talking to them. Something that may or may not ever help patients. And you are being paid a pittance to do it. Everyone reaches a different answer to this question. Some love their research and go onto become successful independent ivestigators. Others hate it and leave science all together.
I fell out somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. I decided to do a postdoc with a significant clinical focus. I really want to focus on research that may help patients rather than probing the depths of some obscure protein. And after all my time doing basic science research I found that I really didn't enjoy it very much.
Would I go back to traditional pharmacy? Not unless the alternative was starvation. Personally, I find no redeeming value in a career as a staff pharmacist. I still still remember going to bed with aching legs and waking up the morning after a three day shift at CVS with legs so sore that I couldn't walk. Constant phones rining, every single thing a problem that needed to be solved yesterday. I could barely handle this when I was young and I doubt I could handle it any better now that I'm several years older.
If I could do things over, I don't think I would have gone to graduate school. I would have focused much more on alternative career paths for a PharmD. Many of these seem like they could be quite enjoyable and I could have even gotten into clinical research with a PharmD.
