How Bad Is It?

[freshbeatschris]

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Hi folks. I'm still in the pre-pharm stage right now with a year left to go before my pharmacy schooling begins. I have some days with just the pre-pharm coursework as well as work when I don't think I can handle the pressure. Is pharmacy school exponentially worse than pre-pharm school in your opinion? Was the first year a shock to the system? How much calculus is actually involved in pharmacy coursework?

Thanks for your responses in advance. 🙂

Chris

 

[fairyofsong]

Hi folks. I'm still in the pre-pharm stage right now with a year left to go before my pharmacy schooling begins. I have some days with just the pre-pharm coursework as well as work when I don't think I can handle the pressure. Is pharmacy school exponentially worse than pre-pharm school in your opinion? Was the first year a shock to the system? How much calculus is actually involved in pharmacy coursework?

Thanks for your responses in advance. 🙂

Chris

Hey Chris--

I'm in my first year and honestly, it is definately a lot of work. I mean, everyone knows that but you don't really know until you do it. It's a lot to keep up in 6 intense classes. I haven't seen a lot of Calculus yet, I'm only in my first pharmacy calculations class. BUT--I have to warn you and I wish someone had warned me--do Organic Chemistry to LEARN it and not just to get an A and forget it. That is one class that matters a lot as far as understanding things. It will come back to haunt you! 😉

Don't be discouraged, just be prepared. I go to school every day from 9 or 10 until 3:30 or 4:30. Every Tuesday my anatomy prof holds an extra session (optional) at 5 pm. So you can see I spend a lot of time AT school. And when I come home, it's basically homework and studying. It's much more intense than my prepharm was. One week we had 3 tests and 1 quiz. Everything counts, nothing is dropped. It can be challenging to learn to manage your subjects... after the first set of tests I learned how much time and what to do for each class..

Best of luck and feel free to ask me whatever!! I try to get on here about twice a week (for a break!) 😉

 

[rxforlife2004]

🙂 I personally think it depends on your background, ability. One might find it hard when another finds it's reasonable or easy. But overall: DO STUDY HARD! 🙂 I'm a 2nd year student at USN. Our school is a 3 yr program and we only have 2 didactic years (P1, P-2), block system. A lot of time, we're so overwhelmed with some heavy blocks that you can imagine we have 60 or more slide shows or Power Point Presentation/day, and every single one of them contains detailed information. But It's all about time management. A lot of my classmates are working now, too. As for me, I work 24 hrs/week. On the days that i don't work, I study at least 4-5 hrs. On the day that i work, i try to study as much as i could. Estimation of my study hours = 20-25 hrs/week.

 

[dgroulx]

I'd say that the first year wasn't much worse than my senior year of college. Year two was harder academically, but it wasn't that time intensive. I pretty much studied a day or two before each exam. Now I'm in year 3 and I can barely keep up with the coursework. It's all appication of knowledge at this point. I have so many different patient cases for each class, it's hard to keep them straight. The coursework itself is much easier. It just takes time to look up every recommendation you make, find the primary literature, etc.

 

[crossurfingers]

First year was better than I thought it would be, although it gets stressful balancing classes and a job. I'm a second year now though and I hear it's one of the worst years so we'll see how it goes. Just don't procrastinate (too much) and keep up with everything and you should be fine. I actually found my undergrad years more difficult, but that may have been due to my more active social life back then. 😉

 

[bananaface]

Moving to pre-pharmacy as this is an advising question...

- Anna 🙂