(Edit: oops, title should say "search"... you can trust me with filling your Rxs, I swear! lol....)
Hi,
I would appreciate any serious input on this matter....
I am going to be a 2011 grad and have interned at the retail level for 2 summers and have worked retail for 6 years... Graduation is FAR away right now (over a year) but I have received an offer for an interview for a possible early-commit for a retail job. I am 95% sure I'd be okay with doing retail, about 100% sure I'd be good at it, and about 95% sure I'd be burned out after a while....
After some experience, I am pretty sure I would like to be a nuclear pharmacist. However, jobs are few and far in between, especially if you want to be selective about the state you want to work and be licensed in... obviously, not as many nuclear pharmacies as there are retail pharmacies...
Now, because of the current economic situation and jobs are tight, even on the pharmacy level, what is your opinion on accepting a retail job (with great salary, benefits, job security, ease of transferring to another retail if you had to move) vs waiting it out for a nuclear pharmacist position (job satisfaction high, less stress, but may not ever come along...)
In this time, would you be thankful for an offer for an early commit, or would you stick it out for the possibility of a dream job that may never come?
(oh, and if you reject the early commit, basically count them out for future offers....)
well you got no nuke experience...so.. applying for nuc jobs, you will be in the same position both now, and in several years when one opens up in your state. so taking a retail job doesnt seem like it would really hurt you in that regard. I work in nuke and will have 3 yrs intern experience by the time i graduate, and while nuke jobs are definitely available if you have experience one thing you should know is that jobs in desirable locations usually have a good chance of being taken by people transferring from inside the company, so they may not be available to people on the "outside" so to speak. What i mean by this is, if you want to break into the nuke industry, without prior experience, you will probably need to move across the country to take one of the few nuke openings, and depending on where you live, I wouldnt expect to have a good chance at waiting for one and applying from retail if you live in a "hot" location like west coast of CA, nyc, boston, south florida, etc. Right now there are a lot of nuke jobs open in ohio that dont seem to be getting filled. You might look into moving there if you are interested. Otherwise, if you're living in the midwest, south, mountain west, you may have a better chance of moving from nuke to retail in the future with no experience - I know a few people in the nuke community around here who came from retail without experience.
With the job market getting tough for the next few years (at least until HCR kicks in) I would choose what you want to do in the future right now.
Be sure to consider the pros and cons of each. Also, I have encountered fewer burned out retail pharmacists in rural areas, the pace of work there is much slower and patients tend to be a lot friendlier and less rude. You could always transfer locations if you feel you are burning out at one. Nuke, you wont really be able to transfer.
Retail pluses obviously are fast paced work, high pay, getting to interact with people. Nuke pluses are more vacation, getting to sit down, and getting to have breaks. Downsides of nuke are obviously the schedule, only working with the same 2-4 drugs, and of course never using 99% of what you learned in pharmacy school. (I would say retail , you still use maybe 15% of what you learned).
Let me know if you have any more questions about nuke pharm - it's what I went to pharmacy school to do, more or less. If I get out and there are no nuke openings, I'll probably just work a throwaway job and go live with my parents for a few months.
I've been watching the nuke job market for a few years now, and one thing that is definitely true is that jobs rotate around through different areas. If one is not open where you live now, it should be eventually, even if it takes 5-10 years. And right now, even at the bottom of the market, so to speak, there are still maybe 30 ish (maybe more unadvertised) nuke job openings across the country, and usually encompassing somewhere between 10 and 20 states to choose from at a given time, so that is somewhat reassuring. However if it gets worse, you'll be competing for fewer positions with the same number of people inside and people with intern experience in the future, so you might want to jump on nuke now if you can.
One other downside i would see to going nuke is.. there seem to be a number of pharmacists who go nuke and decide it isnt for them (probably due to the hours and maybe the repetitive nature of the work). If you go nuke and later decide to go back to retail, you may find that the market has tightened up so much that you wouldnt be able to get back into retail in your particular area. Also nuke will need to invest 6-8 months to train you, so thats a pretty big investment on your part and theirs, so make sure it's what you want to do before taking that step.
Edit
You say you have some nuke experience -- I just read that now -- if you do, I would say waiting to transfer into nuke might be a little safer - due to the fact that the number of people with nuke experience is not going to increase as the # of pharmacy schools increase -- there are very few places with nuke internships and it's not likely that having more schools will result in more competitive nuke applicants. In 5 years if a nuke job opens where you live, having had that experience will put you at an advantage over the hundreds of new grads and possibly new-school grads in your area, whereas the reverse -- going from nuke back to retail, seems like it would be harder because retail hires anyone with a pulse, and from a numbers standpoint the market is going to fill up faster.
