I wanted to share my thoughts.
I graduated pharmacy school from a well respected school in the southeast in 2013. I had worked in a pharmacy since my senior year of high school so about 6-7 years of experience. I ended up switching companies due to not getting an area remotely near where I wanted and the area I got was only 30 hours guaranteed floater (something would have opened up full time quick though, but like I said did not want to stay in that area).
I had about 80k of loans with 6.8% interest rate (bs how high it is, all federal Stafford loans)
I started with Walgreens and loved floating, I quickly was placed in one of the busiest stores and hated working 5 days a week and being stressed while at work.
I switched to Wal-mart after 6 months and was placed at an even busier store (about 3k a week, compared to 27-2800). I love wal-mart and only negative is being the PIC and the error policy.
My advice, the jobs are out there, very difficult to get an ideal location, will have to put in time and hope to transfer, this is never guaranteed tho.
If you are going to be over 100k in debt it is NOT WORTH IT, please think about that. With our tax rate and a 1000 a month loan payment for 10 years you will be making about 60k take home after taxes, 401k, loan payment. The biggest problem tho is our salary, I am a strong believer it will go down. We have seen a 4% reduction in reimbursement rates alone this year and it is similar among my independent friends. The big chains are not going to continue to pay us our salary with a reduction like that and more is most likely to come. Flu shots and MTMs are being pushed hard and will soon be mandatory, it's very hard to do these efficiently at busy stores.
Think about going into finance, or petroleum engineering or something similar. Look outside the box, not many jobs are open every holiday, have you working til 9 to 10 o'clock at night, have you working every other weekend or every third weekend. When you have a family these things will be tough. If the current environment and salary stays this way I would still do pharmacy. You would have to be a fool to believe that is the course tho, the amount of change I have seen in 7 years is drastic, salaries have stayed stagnant, companies are giving horrible raises and trying to justify not giving raises due to not meeting sales growth objectives. In this area BiLo cut pharmacists salaries across the board by 5%.
Takeaways:
1) the market is changing in a very negative direction (expect to see 90-100k salaries in the future (next 10 years), best case scenario it stays at 110-125k with no raises which is significantly lower then today due to inflation. A 125k year salary at 2% raise for 10 years is 152k.) This is coupled with worse working conditions.
2) If your loans are greater then 100K (1150.80 monthly payment for 10 years at 6.8% interest) consider wisely if it is worth it, if over 150K (1726 a month, this is >25% your take home pay) it isn't worth it period. Calculate interest during school into this About 130 k principle in school will be 150k when out.
3) think about quality of life, working weekends, late hours, holidays.
I would have done something else had I been 2 years younger, I realized I made a mistake in my second year as the market turned quickly from 09 to 11. I also was suppose to have about 25k less in loans, but the state government changed their scholarship program 3 months before my 5th year.
