Hardest Part of the Application Process?

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What is the hardest part of the application process?

  • Writing the personal statement(s)

    Votes: 60 32.6%

  • Filling out supplemental applications

    Votes: 16 8.7%

  • Obtaining letters of recommendation

    Votes: 27 14.7%

  • Keeping applications straight for non-PharmCAS schools

    Votes: 2 1.1%

  • The Wait (after submission)

    Votes: 67 36.4%

  • Physically filling in the PharmCAS application

    Votes: 6 3.3%

  • Other (please elaborate below)

    Votes: 6 3.3%
  • Total voters
    184
confettiflyer

confettiflyer

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Applicants! What do you think is the hardest part of applying to pharmacy school? Please consider the actual application process only, not taking classes. Answer the poll and post an explanation below of why.

My answer: Asking for letters of recommendation. I have this natural aversion to asking for help, it makes me feel like I'm needy. Plus, a lot of the advisors/professors I worked with...I haven't really kept in touch over the years =( I hate when other people out of the blue ask me for favors, so I assume the same.

But then once I get over that and get the letter...I don't feel so bad. It's just the build-up and getting the guts to ask is tough.
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xcvbvcfgh said:
If you want to get into pharmacy school, send me a private message with your personal statement. I will do my best to edit/comment your personal statement and help you get into pharmacy school. This is a free service. I will try to include bombastic words like, "extravagant, lavish, extraordinary" into your essay and make it sound intelligent but not too "verbose".

Email me at: pharmacyiii at yahoo.com - I promise I will reply within 48 hours.
Click to expand...

Dude stop trolling and expecting people to send their personal statement to you. What is your deal? You've written the same crap on at least 2 different places for people to email you?

I voted the wait was the hardest part.
 
I also voted the wait was the hardest part. I think part of it because it's out of your control at that point.

Also asking the LORs and making sure they send them in....that's a tough one too.

Organizing interviews was also a challenge. Pharmcas schools get your complete app at the same time, so I was asked to a lot of interviews all around the same time. Going to them, paying for them, getting off work, rescheduling an exam, was all a large hassle....but obviously it was worth it.

Actually for my UF interview it was a huge hassle. Fortunately I had asked off from work already because I was supposed to be in a wedding in Ohio the next day! My interview was on a Friday in Jacksonville and I was supposed to fly from Jacksonville to Ohio that afternoon (got lucky in that it was the same airport!) It would have been $400 to change my flight to Friday night so I got one at 6:30 AM Saturday morning the day of the wedding. I made it there without a problem but I had to rush to get ready and I couldnt relax the whole day thinking what if Im delayed etc. I was in Ohio less than 24 hours but it was all worth it since I got accepted!!
 
other- getting my transcripts to PharmCAS in time. i had to keep on the butts of people in the office to make sure they got to my request quickly. it took them 4 weeks! since it was RECEIVED!
 
Wow, those are some pretty amazing words you would add in there. I don't know how I would come up with those on my own. :rolleyes: I think I can sound intelligent on my own.

xcvbvcfgh said:
If you want to get into pharmacy school, send me a private message with your personal statement. I will do my best to edit/comment your personal statement and help you get into pharmacy school. This is a free service. I will try to include bombastic words like, "extravagant, lavish, extraordinary" into your essay and make it sound intelligent but not too "verbose".

Email me at: pharmacyiii at yahoo.com - I promise I will reply within 48 hours.
Click to expand...
 
supplementals would be the worse. if you're applying to 5+ schools, all those essays are going to suck.
 
Waiting because at that point everything is out of your hands and there's nothing you can do. I struggle with dealing with situations where things are out of my control.
 
xcvbvcfgh said:
If you want to get into pharmacy school, send me a private message with your personal statement. I will do my best to edit/comment your personal statement and help you get into pharmacy school. This is a free service. I will try to include bombastic words like, "extravagant, lavish, extraordinary" into your essay and make it sound intelligent but not too "verbose".

Email me at: pharmacyiii at yahoo.com - I promise I will reply within 48 hours.
Click to expand...

First you try to steal letters of recommendation from pharmacists, now you are trying to steal personal statements.

Considering how dishonest you are, I really hope you don't make it into pharmacy school.
 
I am just starting it so i have yet to experience everything...

I guess letters of rec beats out personal statement slightly. Having to depend on people and try to find them, plus worry about how good of a job they will do is not something that i enjoy.... Personal statement, although, dificult b/c of the character limit and stuff u can control yourself...
 
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i have to say... the waiting & not-knowing part was the worse. i think the worse part of the wait is the 2 weeks after your interview, waiting to hear the final "judgement" hehe
 
I think the worst part is getting the lor. I just hate depending on other people and It's hard to decide who to ask especially if you have been out of school for a while.
 
I would say that receiving and opening the letter after an interview was the most difficult part of the application process mentally.. I say receiving because sometimes you can tell a rejection letter by its feel.:)

However, your choices seemed to revolve around the applications before the interview decisions. So, the most physically difficult process of the application process was filling out each school's secondary as each school has a unique application that often required a specific essay or something. Mentally, getting the nerve to ask for LORs was difficult too.
 
yeah i tried limiting the scope of my question to include everything before interviews/invitation to interviews.
 
grr....i was going to say writing the personal statement until i saw "new" next to the last reference im waiting for. she was notified before last semester ended AND i explicitly said i wanted to be done by August 1st. I wanted to submit my app the first week or two of August. I emailed her trying to ask nicely what the hold up was. i have not recieved a reply or anything yet. i HATE HATE HATE depending on other people.:thumbdown:
 
i think supplemental applications are the worst because they require so much time with filling out pre-req lists and writing additional essays and even sometimes requiring evaluators to fill in forms unique for the institution
 
The worst/hardest part for me was to obtain the letters of recommendation. I mean everything else you can do yourself, but when you ask someone else to write a letter about you, that's another story. Not to mention if you don't get in the first time or the second time.
 
i don't know why people think the wait or the letters of rec is harder than the supplementals? (according to the poll results)

are the answers to the supp essay questions not that important? i figured you'd have to write (and get proof read) on the same level as your personal statement. maybe is it because the supplemental essays don't carry that much weight when compared to the PS or LORs?
 
KellyBean said:
The worst/hardest part for me was to obtain the letters of recommendation. I mean everything else you can do yourself, but when you ask someone else to write a letter about you, that's another story. Not to mention if you don't get in the first time or the second time.
Click to expand...

I agree completely. I hate having to rely on others to care enough to not give a bad letter and ruin my chances.
 
terse said:
i don't know why people think the wait or the letters of rec is harder than the supplementals? (according to the poll results)

are the answers to the supp essay questions not that important? i figured you'd have to write (and get proof read) on the same level as your personal statement. maybe is it because the supplemental essays don't carry that much weight when compared to the PS or LORs?
Click to expand...

I only applied to one school (UT Austin), and they don't use pharmcas. I just had to apply to the university and then send in my two essays, LORs, resume, and PCAT scores to the college of pharmacy. It was an easy process, but I can imagine how difficult it could be apllying to several different schools and making sure all of your essays are just right for each one.
 
At first, I voted for personal statement and essays. On reflection, I changed to LOR. It may not be as time-consuming but it is the most worrisome of all due to total lack no control over it. I feel forced to ask recommendation from a science professor I have lost contact for 4 years...!!! Our conversation was quite impersonal.

This fear makes me start looking for schools that don't require LOR.:)
I am still hesitant to apply to USN or Drake (no LOR required) despite my borderline GPA and quite a number of Ws.. But I forgot to see that drake has 23-30 seat for transfers. :(

Any other school you that don't require LOR?
I don't think I have a chance in Albany..:)
 
You will get interviews into Pharmacy schools with good essays. There is no better substitute than that. I am a professional essay writer. I have been writing essays since I became a member of SDN. I would like to help out anyone with Personal Statements, and I charge little or no fees. If you are applying to the University of Florida, I will gladly read your essays for free and provide feedback. :)
 
lkdfjgkldfjg said:
You will get interviews into Pharmacy schools with good essays. There is no better substitute than that. I am a professional essay writer. I have been writing essays since I became a member of SDN. I would like to help out anyone with Personal Statements, and I charge little or no fees. If you are applying to the University of Florida, I will gladly read your essays for free and provide feedback. :)
Click to expand...

Warning to all students who take advantage of essay reading services...there are a handful who will STEAL your essay/essay idea and use it for their own application.

Please be mindful when responding to any posts like above, especially from "new" members.
 
lkdfjgkldfjg said:
You will get interviews into Pharmacy schools with good essays. There is no better substitute than that. I am a professional essay writer. I have been writing essays since I became a member of SDN. I would like to help out anyone with Personal Statements, and I charge little or no fees. If you are applying to the University of Florida, I will gladly read your essays for free and provide feedback. :)
Click to expand...

Wow...this is your first post :laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:
 
For me, the hardest part is writing the personal statement essay. I believe I'm a fairly good writer but the 500 word limit is just a big hurdle for me to overcome. I have so many things I want to say and sometimes I feel like I'm butchering my essay if I take something out for brevity's sake. Right now, I'm still working on my essays for Texas Tech and it's holding me back from turning in my apps.

Asking for LORs was hard too but at least my professors remembered me. I agree with Knickerbocker though about how your references might actually ruin your chances by writing bad LORs for you. I hope nothing like that happens to me.
 
I'm still working on application requirements and I've been in for a semester now. Getting all the physicals, immunizations, blood tests, financial aid docs, transcripts, post acceptance really just sucks.
 
The long delays. I took the august pcat and submitted everything about a week after I got my score. It still hasnt been mailed out.
 
Farmercyst said:
I'm still working on application requirements and I've been in for a semester now. Getting all the physicals, immunizations, blood tests, financial aid docs, transcripts, post acceptance really just sucks.
Click to expand...

+pity+ pre-acceptance sucks even more :laugh: :hungover:
 
Stupid recommenders! They take thier dang on time!!
 
The whole process is horrible. I thought for awhile that getting LORs was so easy...why would anyone think that was the worst part of it? That is until one of my recommenders gave me a copy of the letter she submitted to a school I was applying to. It was just AWFUL! Somehow I still got an interview...am still waiting to hear on the final decision from this school, but how they decided to interview me after this particular letter of recommendation just blows me away. I thought I had chosen a person with a decent ability to write a coherent letter who really knew and liked me, but good grief, this thing she wrote was terrible...and she was really trying to convey that I was an excellent candidate.

The whole PharmCAS process is so tedious and time consuming, the supplemental applications are no fun, and paying to apply to all of these places is even worse, but in the end we all want to be pharmacists right? It ends up being worth it....just stick with it!

Sure is fun to vent though!
 
JamesL1585 said:
Stupid recommenders! They take thier dang on time!!
Click to expand...

I asked three people to do recommendations for me.

The first one did them as fast as humanly possible. I gave them to him on Friday afternoon, and he had them ready for me on Monday morning!

The second one is actively working on them and keeps me updated. I expect him to hand me everything sometime in the near future.

The third one has the stuff I gave her in the middle of a paper pile on her desk, untouched. She also uses them as leverage against me for various things :(
 
Knickerbocker said:
I asked three people to do recommendations for me.

The first one did them as fast as humanly possible. I gave them to him on Friday afternoon, and he had them ready for me on Monday morning!

The second one is actively working on them and keeps me updated. I expect him to hand me everything sometime in the near future.

The third one has the stuff I gave her in the middle of a paper pile on her desk, untouched. She also uses them as leverage against me for various things :(
Click to expand...

Oh godddd I feel so bad for you for the third one, he/she hasn't even turned it in yet and their already using that against u! So sad!! But my pharmacists did that to me, he took a month to finish it up, then once he actually did it he goes "Hey, you better work extra hard for me, u know on your application it said we can refute our recommendation at any time..." Im like WTF! Joke or no joke, thats not funny!!
 
my pharmacist had to bother me actually (i'm ghost writing it and giving it to them review/additions/etc...). It's weird hearing "Hey are you done with your letter of rec yet?' haha
 
confettiflyer said:
my pharmacist had to bother me actually (i'm ghost writing it and giving it to them review/additions/etc...). It's weird hearing "Hey are you done with your letter of rec yet?' haha
Click to expand...

That show "Ghostwriter" was so lame!:laugh:

But anywho, my advice to people when picking who to write your LORs is to pick people that you know to be punctual, somewhat anal, or who in general just has always has their poop in a group if you know what I mean. Otherwise your request for a LOR will end up stuck in "the middle of a paper pile" on their desk and you will have to remind them a couple times a week that the LOR is indeed time sensitive. So annoying!
 
I'm going with pulsedriver on this one. Carmen Sandiego rocked my world. And the computer game on the old school Apple IIe was pretty fun too!
 
haha now you guys are comparing apples to oranges, but i do agree carmen san diego was great. I like the acapella group...what was their name?

and i got mad whenever the end map was of the US...c;mon, that's freakin' easy.
 
Ethyl Methyl said:
Wow...this is your first post :laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:
Click to expand...

Good, they banned him quickly. It's our old friend, xvc...whatever. In the past, he had posted email addresses for some of his other aliases. Doing a Google search for those revealed that the guy is actually part of a large number of various Internet scams - from stealing personal statements and selling them to eBay auction fraud.

I wonder why he hasn't been arrested yet.
 
Knickerbocker said:
Good, they banned him quickly. It's our old friend, xvc...whatever. In the past, he had posted email addresses for some of his other aliases. Doing a Google search for those revealed that the guy is actually part of a large number of various Internet scams - from stealing personal statements and selling them to eBay auction fraud.

I wonder why he hasn't been arrested yet.
Click to expand...

I just thought it was hilarious. There's an old saying that goes "you catch a fish by its mouth."
 
MODS! take down this thread! :sleep:

I love the waiting part. It puts me to sleep. :smuggrin:
 
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