interested in the best well rounded pharm education.
pseudo-significant other in philly... and is also closer to home
what are your thoughts?
I don't know much about TJ other than that it's new and has decent faculty. It probably has good rotation sites too because it's got a teaching hospital nearby with the medical school. I guess if you are concerned about money, TJ might be a better option as UofM ain't cheap. I posted this in the other Michigan thread which you might find useful if you haven't read it already:
Pros: Education here is focused towards clinical pharmacy, though about 40% of the class ends up in community practice. Your professors write the guidelines or helped to create them in their area of expertise. Therapeutics is organized so that every section has one clinical pharmacist who teaches that section, most of whom are good teachers who know how to apply the clinical knowledge to various circumstances and give you perspectives on not only to learn the guidelines, but how to apply them. There are amazing rotation sites at a world class teaching hospital, and two years of therapeutics for a strong pharmacy core knowledge. The UofM name pretty much guarantees you a residency somewhere and you will have a strong grasp of knowledge (I can't really figure out how I'm going to be proficient considering how fast I forget stuff) once you graduate. This could be a con, but all pharmacy students are required to do a PharmD research project over the course of two years, where research must be conducted, data analyzed, and summarily written like a thesis and presented before a committee. Works wonders for residency applications as well as juggling projects once in the respective programs. The curriculum here really is quite immaculate and well thought out after many years of trial and error, even if it isn't always successful in teaching you all that it was designed to on paper.
There's an automatic alumni scholarship for your 3rd and 4th years (out of state gets 7k each year, instate gets around 4-5?). The city is also quite affluent and a liberal bastion in the middle of nowhere. There's a lot of great bar scenes, crazy people when football comes around, and nice restaurants for those who like to spend $$. You also get 4 months off during EVERY summer.
Cons: It's really cold and expensive: i pay ~34k a year in out of state tuition though the school is much more open to admitting nonresidents at around 30-40% of every class. Therapeutics is structured so that you'll have to memorize all these nuances and details that no one would ever really retain in practice, but I suppose that's in the spirit of 'being a good clinician' in being able to make the decisions given a certain set of information. Critical thinking and judgment is an annoying skill that takes time to learn where some pick it up faster than others. Brute memorization won't really work anymore. Pharmacology is taught by Old Relics in the medical school who love making you learn a lot of random/nonsensical information where you'd probably never be able to pass an exam with unless you had the 10+ years of old exams in the Ctools test bank. The P1 year also doesn't really do much as it's just an easy year of prerequisites so you feel like you're wasting your time in never learning any pharmacy. The P2 year really picks up and is relentless in the amount of work and time commitment compared to the first year. So much for bars 3-4x a week. I also hear the P3 year is the worst because the difficulty of therapeutics just amplifies to another level with topics such as infectious disease and cardiology.
Also, you only have time for electives in your P3 year, as therapeutics absorbs most of the material that you would take as an elective in other schools. You also have to take non-health related electives in order to graduate. Another con is that every year a certain number (a couple maybe?) are held back because of the rigors of the curriculum. You'd think that after all the gatekeeping, Michigan would be trying to retain its students, but by putting the bar so high a lot of people actually end up repeating classes/years and a number of people failed out. One can wonder if they had gone to an easier pharmacy school would they have made it, but speculation always says that it may have been due to a number of extraneous reasons such as pharmacy not being a fit, personal problems and what not - and everyone likes to say that their pharmacy school is the hardest. Another pro/con is that the PharmD degree here is so comprehensive that a lot of the courses end up seemingly useless because you'll never apply everything you learned in school. As a result, you pick and choose what's important to you, but you never know, somewhere down the line you might want to switch and having the course might come in handy?
Bottom line: the education is top notch, but you're in for a ride if that's what you're looking for. This ain't no diploma mill!
