Having been a PharmD student once upon a time, I get it. Having a review site would have been really useful.
Having been a preceptor, I see a side I never considered as a student. As an industry rotation site, we put in a lot to give students as good an experience as we can. However, here are some things to consider that I never knew as a student:
1. First, getting a rotation approved isn't always easy. In fact, in a pharmaceutical company it often takes a would-be preceptor several presentations to get approval. You have to convince the directors within your department and gain their support. Then you usually have to do the same with your department head. If you've gone that far successfully, now it's time to convince someone way higher up (like a site head, president level individual, or chief medical officer) and sometimes Human Resources as well. At this point, they're often skeptical that precepting PharmD rotation students will be worth it....despite not having to pay them. They want to know how much time it's going to take away from full time employees to precept students. They want to know what kind of value students can potentially add - and they want quantitative information. Over and over, the message is that the companies aren't about to run a pharmacy school for the sake of it - they're expecting professionals to walk in and add some kind of value. If you successfully convince them of such, then you got your approval and can start the work of creating a curriculum.
2. That's just the beginning. Maintaining a quality rotation program is easier said than done. It's easy to do the first few, when people are excited with a new program and willing to support. After a couple back to back students, it's harder to keep the momentum and motivation going from everyone. It helps when you have stellar students, but it's not realistic to expect every student to be a high performer that is highly motivated and mature. When you get the ones that are looking to just cruise, you wonder if this is when word will get around and there'll be pressure to just drop the program altogether.
3. There are always people that are looking to shut down the rotation program at the slightest sign it's taking away value (employee time) more than adding value - and it's not easy to find ways to quantify how a student who is only there for 1-1.5 months is going to add tangible value. If there was a review site and I saw that our program was getting negative reviews, the likely response would be to inform the school that we don't have adquate resources to maintain a quality program and will be discontinuing. I believe this wouldn't benefit students at all. As it is, the schools are always telling us that there aren't enough pharma/biotech rotation sites to meet the increased demand of students trying to select them.
