Need Help with Career Direction! Please!

[PharmRX0308]

Hello everyone,

I love teaching and willing to do research, but a residency is required for that (This is the primary reason why I wanted to pursue a residency). I love pharmacy and learning about the medications, but I don't like the interactive nature of the job. I'm a introvert person and talking to patients/nurses all day will drain me real quick. English is also not my native language, so I do have an accent when speaking. People usually notice that and some people would look down on me despite my knowledge and performance. I'm extremely stressed out.

I'm looking into non-paitent care jobs (e.g. academia) but these are obviously the minority of jobs. If you have any advice or experience with this stage of mood and emotion, please let me know! Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

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[Rouelle]

If you want to get into academia, you pretty much need either a residency (which will include hospital/patient-care pretty much throughout your career) or a PhD.

 

[ImmunoglobulinE]

Also if you do a masters degree in a relevant course and have some on the job experience, you may be able to land a faculty position.

Masters in Public Health
masters in Pharmacoeconomics
and so on
Or you could just go to law school get a JD and teach Pharmacy law ( This is actually one of my dream retirement job )

 

[zelman]

You don’t like practicing pharmacy. You like being a pharmacy student. Unfortunately, that is not a viable career. Figure out what actual career you want and plan on working part time retail while getting your next degree.

 

[johnpharm01]

So, hospital pharmacy and retail pharmacy comprise the vast majority of pharmacists jobs. It is also a bad market for pharmacists. There are jobs outside of it i.e. mail order, third party but you are asking a lot.

 

[PharmRX0308]

Thanks everyone! I think pursuing a master, PHD, or fellowship are all great options. I will definitely look into these areas.

 

[bacillus1]

How about a managed care residency? Seems like there are a good number of jobs that that can be used for. Just make sure you do a managed care rotation to make sure it's right for you.

 

[postcolor]

Thanks everyone! I think pursuing a master, PHD, or fellowship are all great options. I will definitely look into these areas.

Hi! I have very recently been loooking into PharmD/PhD programs for similar reasons you explained above. I don’t want to deal with rude patients and I’m not sure I would enjoy working in a hospital. If you can get your PhD you can do all the research you want and have a lot more opportunity, career wise.

 

[BidingMyTime]

Yes, hospital and retail positions are easily 85-90% of pharmacist jobs. If you don't like them, then chances of finding a job outside of them are pretty slim. Many of the remaining jobs, are in areas like nursing homes, infusion, or ambulatory care, where the jobs aren't that dissimilar to hospital. People who don't like retail should think long and hard about being a pharmacist, because chances are, they will be working in retail. People who don't like retail or hospital, have definitely picked the wrong career.

 

[riri3435]

You might want to look into the role of a long-term care consultant pharmacist. Low stress, you get to use your clinical knowledge, and mainly interact with nurses and facility management.

 

[wucool33]

Come to Los Angeles... I was eating brunch earlier and there were an Italian couple to the right of me and a French couple to the right. My server was Mexican... no one will give a **** about your accent here.

 

[mustang sally]

You might want to look into the role of a long-term care consultant pharmacist. Low stress, you get to use your clinical knowledge, and mainly interact with nurses and facility management.

This is what I was going to suggest. You could just do consults all day long and barely talk to anyone.

 

[PharmtoCS]

Come to Los Angeles... I was eating brunch earlier and there were an Italian couple to the right of me and a French couple to the right. My server was Mexican... no one will give a **** about your accent here.

There are no jobs in LA though.

 

[PharmtoCS]

Yes, hospital and retail positions are easily 85-90% of pharmacist jobs. If you don't like them, then chances of finding a job outside of them are pretty slim. Many of the remaining jobs, are in areas like nursing homes, infusion, or ambulatory care, where the jobs aren't that dissimilar to hospital. People who don't like retail should think long and hard about being a pharmacist, because chances are, they will be working in retail. People who don't like retail or hospital, have definitely picked the wrong career.

Facepalm at the OP not realizing this until they’re just about to graduate.

 

[sozetone]

Hello everyone,

I am a final year pharmacy student and currently on my experiential rotation. I have always wanted to do a pharmacy residency, but my rotations have changed my mind and completely convinced me that hospital environment is not where I want to be. I interned for a retail chain pharmacy during my P2, and I also cannot handle the stress and patients' rudeness in retail. I am completely lost at the moment with my future. I understand that residency, hospital, and retail are not the only options post-pharmD, but I don't know how to get started in other areas.

I love teaching and willing to do research, but a residency is required for that (This is the primary reason why I wanted to pursue a residency). I love pharmacy and learning about the medications, but I don't like the interactive nature of the job. I'm a introvert person and talking to patients/nurses all day will drain me real quick. English is also not my native language, so I do have an accent when speaking. People usually notice that and some people (including my preceptor right now) would look down on me despite my knowledge and performance. I'm extremely stressed out.

I'm looking into non-paitent care jobs (e.g. academia) but these are obviously the minority of jobs. If you have any advice or experience with this stage of mood and emotion, please let me know! Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

I hate to be offensive, but you are part of the 70% who thought it would be cool/easy money to be a pharmacist. You are realizing now that the world and business is much different than you ever imagined, or were told in pharmacy school. REALITY CHECK!

 

[Amicable Angora]

Hello everyone,

I am a final year pharmacy student and currently on my experiential rotation. I have always wanted to do a pharmacy residency, but my rotations have changed my mind and completely convinced me that hospital environment is not where I want to be. I interned for a retail chain pharmacy during my P2, and I also cannot handle the stress and patients' rudeness in retail. I am completely lost at the moment with my future. I understand that residency, hospital, and retail are not the only options post-pharmD, but I don't know how to get started in other areas.

I love teaching and willing to do research, but a residency is required for that (This is the primary reason why I wanted to pursue a residency). I love pharmacy and learning about the medications, but I don't like the interactive nature of the job. I'm a introvert person and talking to patients/nurses all day will drain me real quick. English is also not my native language, so I do have an accent when speaking. People usually notice that and some people (including my preceptor right now) would look down on me despite my knowledge and performance. I'm extremely stressed out.

I'm looking into non-paitent care jobs (e.g. academia) but these are obviously the minority of jobs. If you have any advice or experience with this stage of mood and emotion, please let me know! Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Masters degree is useless for your situation, you would either need to (suck it up) do a residency, fellowship, or a PhD

 

[postcolor]

I hate to be offensive, but you are part of the 70% who thought it would be cool/easy money to be a pharmacist. You are realizing now that the world and business is much different than you ever imagined, or were told in pharmacy school. REALITY CHECK!

That’s ridiculous to say. Just because they realized they don’t like retail or hospitals has nothing to do with what they thought the field would be like. No one who is in pharmacy school & has gotten through three years of it would say they thought it was easy. It’s a good thing the field is extremely broad and you don’t have to like retail or hospitals. NOT A REALITY CHECK!

 

[CetiAlphaFive]

I hate to be offensive, but you are part of the 70% who thought it would be cool/easy money to be a pharmacist. You are realizing now that the world and business is much different than you ever imagined, or were told in pharmacy school. REALITY CHECK!

I guess this is the newest "rage at the world while pretending I'm fine" poster

 

[Sabril]

Hello everyone,

I am a final year pharmacy student and currently on my experiential rotation. I have always wanted to do a pharmacy residency, but my rotations have changed my mind and completely convinced me that hospital environment is not where I want to be. I interned for a retail chain pharmacy during my P2, and I also cannot handle the stress and patients' rudeness in retail. I am completely lost at the moment with my future. I understand that residency, hospital, and retail are not the only options post-pharmD, but I don't know how to get started in other areas.

I love teaching and willing to do research, but a residency is required for that (This is the primary reason why I wanted to pursue a residency). I love pharmacy and learning about the medications, but I don't like the interactive nature of the job. I'm a introvert person and talking to patients/nurses all day will drain me real quick. English is also not my native language, so I do have an accent when speaking. People usually notice that and some people (including my preceptor right now) would look down on me despite my knowledge and performance. I'm extremely stressed out.

I'm looking into non-paitent care jobs (e.g. academia) but these are obviously the minority of jobs. If you have any advice or experience with this stage of mood and emotion, please let me know! Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

just curious why didn't you want to do a residency or want to be in a hospital? My reason was I dreaded the workload of a residency (i.e., I'm lazy). Though thinking back, if residency was mandatory, I would have finished it no problems. I think what really got into me was the fact that residency was a choice and if I made the wrong choice, I only had myself to blame.

 

[PharmRX0308]

I think what holding me back is the experience that I'm having with my current rotation. The clinical pharmacists here always seem tired and worn out. During rounds, my preceptor would be listening to the physicians and passively taking orders without any questions or discussions. The hospital is small (about 150 beds), and the pharmacists have to constantly rotate between floors, ER, main pharmacy, and the ICU. They are always super busy and so when I ask questions they seem pretty unhappy. With that said, I believe different hospital has different workflow and work culture, so I am waiting for my next hospital experience before making any final call.

 

[W19]

Hello everyone,

I love teaching and willing to do research, but a residency is required for that (This is the primary reason why I wanted to pursue a residency). I love pharmacy and learning about the medications, but I don't like the interactive nature of the job. I'm a introvert person and talking to patients/nurses all day will drain me real quick. English is also not my native language, so I do have an accent when speaking. People usually notice that and some people (including my preceptor right now) would look down on me despite my knowledge and performance. I'm extremely stressed out.

I'm looking into non-paitent care jobs (e.g. academia) but these are obviously the minority of jobs. If you have any advice or experience with this stage of mood and emotion, please let me know! Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

There is a good % of foreigners that work in the medical field and a lot of them (myself included) speak English with an accent. I find it strange that your preceptor (a pharmacist) look down on you because you have accent despite your performance. I remember reading somewhere that ~30% of physicians were born outside of the US. I wonder what % of pharmacists were born outside of the US.

 

[lord999]

Well, I don't recommend applying for graduate school before you've done some basic research, both about what life as a career scientist is like and on the actual work.

I don't know @Rouelle 's story, but I know that most of the PhD's who went to professional training (MD, PharmD) afterwards did so for one or more of the following reasons:

1. You don't actually do all that much science in most positions. You spend most of your time as a professional beggar for funds or managing the adult day care center of a laboratory. And by the way, bench science personnel tend to be on the lower-functioning scale in terms of social cues, so taking care of them to get them to do work is not easy. You spend more time politicking for space, money, and talent than you actually do accomplish with those resources.

2. Teaching is not rewarding from a career perspective. Most places do not tenure pure teaching professors anymore, and those with regular academic jobs have to worry about funding and productivity in terms of impact before teaching which is considered to be a chore.

3. For the reasons above, it's very high stress as jobs are unstable.

But the reason that applies to you is that you are not introspective enough to really understand what pharmacy is about, why would graduate school work any better without knowledge of research practice? But furthermore, you do not have a positive reason for going, and that's almost always fatal to finishing.

On balance, I do not think the career ROI of the PhD route (money, time, career trajectory) is generally as good as even marginal professions like pharmacy...unless the work itself is the reward. If you just like being a researcher, then come on in, but if you think a PhD is a means to an end, you might to figure out a more direct route as the opportunity costs are very high for pursuing that. For most PhDs, they end up worse off from a material perspective than if they took a more direct money route, so, there has to be a different motivation to make it worth your while.

 

[lord999]

That’s ridiculous to say. Just because they realized they don’t like retail or hospitals has nothing to do with what they thought the field would be like. No one who is in pharmacy school & has gotten through three years of it would say they thought it was easy. It’s a good thing the field is extremely broad and you don’t have to like retail or hospitals. NOT A REALITY CHECK!

I disagree profoundly. Yes, there are other jobs in pharmacy (I and others work them), but the classical outpatient and inpatient ones are ones that not only is a pharmacist expected to have working knowledge of as they are the rule, but all those exceptional jobs are derivative of those two baseline practices. To not know that you dislike the majority of the profession's work pathways is quite a failure of introspection.

And as @BidingMyTime notes, I can't think of any nontraditional jobs that don't require the same underlying skills as retail and/or hospital. The one thing that I got introduced to in academia that retail never had was a truly malevolent counterparty. Sure, you can have actively problematic customers, and some might even put pantyhose on their head and pull out a machete on you for some Dilaudid, but that's nothing compared to a sociopath hell-bent on ruining your career so that he/she can pick up the research gap that you leave behind. The one thing that I took from hospital was small-group dynamics and bureaucracy, and you definitely apply them elsewhere. Nuclear, informatics, infusion, analysis, research, and QI, sure, the use of skills will be different from the traditional pathways, but the same skillsets apply.

 

[Sabril]

1. You don't actually do all that much science in most positions. You spend most of your time as a professional beggar for funds or managing the adult day care center of a laboratory. And by the way, bench science personnel tend to be on the lower-functioning scale in terms of social cues, so taking care of them to get them to do work is not easy. You spend more time politicking for space, money, and talent than you actually do accomplish with those resources.

2. Teaching is not rewarding from a career perspective. Most places do not tenure pure teaching professors anymore, and those with regular academic jobs have to worry about funding and productivity in terms of impact before teaching which is considered to be a chore.

3. For the reasons above, it's very high stress as jobs are unstable.

But the reason that applies to you is that you are not introspective enough to really understand what pharmacy is about, why would graduate school work any better without knowledge of research practice? But furthermore, you do not have a positive reason for going, and that's almost always fatal to finishing.

great insight. I know about the politics and the begging for funds part in academia but I didn't know about the problematic underlings in the lab. I always thought they are more like grad students who do not need babysitting but I am dead wrong.

What's about those pharmacy professors with one or two years of residency who teach like one or two modules/courses? Is teaching their main thing or they have the same obligations as a PhD?I don't believe they get paid much and it is more like a prestige thing? I don't see them hanging around for long.

 

[lord999]

great insight. I know about the politics and the begging for funds part in academia but I didn't know about the problematic underlings in the lab. I always thought they are more like grad students who do not need babysitting but I am dead wrong.

What's about those pharmacy professors with one or two years of residency who teach like one or two modules/courses? Is teaching their main thing or they have the same obligations as a PhD?I don't believe they get paid much and it is more like a prestige thing? I don't see them hanging around for long.

No, adjunct or practice faculty do not have the same rights as tenure-track/tenured faculty. About adjunct (part-time) practice faculty in general, there's two or three types of professors who fit that definition (in order of preference):

1. Occupational hobbyist (Academia is a hobby): Genuine practitioners who do a couple of classes out of sense of mission or playfulness and know that it's a nice career enrichment activity, but not their mainline source of income (it sometimes is a decent supplement but not usually). This is almost always the good kind, the sort of person who brings a reality check to your ivory tower, but always gets back to the real world. Happens with good teaching hospital relationships and can even happen with CVS and Walgreens when they send practice faculty over (if they draw from their actual ranks and not their boosted monkey jobs). If you sit on the faculty relations committee, you are looking for someone where teaching is an end of itself for the candidate. (Privately, you also hope but not officially try to select someone who is married, because a story as old as time in the business is a "volunteer" practitioner shopping for a spouse among the students and resigns when the mission is accomplished.)

2. Disenfranchised nomadic dilettante (Academia is a denied Arcadia): One rank up from the eternal postdoc, it's a faculty member that brings in no money, does not do any service, and is not considered critical for any teaching job. They have to cobble together a bunch of adjunct positions to keep afloat. Inevitably, they burn out, get jaded, and basically put themselves in mediocre territory, bad enough that you don't want to keep them, good enough that you're not willing to active look for someone else.

3. Occupational escapist (Academia is a psychic prison): Could be from 1 or 2 as well, but for whatever character defect is present: ego, introspection, womanizing (this is becoming a thing of the past with enforced sexual harassment rules) or external motivations (seven sins), both drives the person to teach but is inevitably a slave to their defects and the classes suffer for it. Tenure-track spouses on support and out-of-process hires (like from industry) tend to be this sort. Rarely, you'll get a company like Walgreens who volunteers one of their management pharmacists as faculty, where they actually have other missions as well. We literally got a faculty member once when they closed part of the Groton Pfizer facility with a massive grant (>6M a year for 8 years) with instructions to keep him occupied and not let him work for a competitor for that amount of time. The Dean though we scored a coup, but cooler heads thought to themselves, "why the hell would Pfizer not just pay the guy to stay in an office rather than go through this overly complicated route." Among other things, turns out that he was an HR problem magnet, and we had to go so far as refuse the money after three years, because the guy was such a problem.

 

[PharmtoCS]

That’s ridiculous to say. Just because they realized they don’t like retail or hospitals has nothing to do with what they thought the field would be like. No one who is in pharmacy school & has gotten through three years of it would say they thought it was easy. It’s a good thing the field is extremely broad and you don’t have to like retail or hospitals. NOT A REALITY CHECK!

That’s because retail and hospital combined make up about 90% of all available jobs to pharmacists and practically everyone wants the unicorn 10% or so. Being unwilling to work in either setting is like the average American worker saying that they will absolutely not take any job that puts them below the top 10% of wage earners, or about $130k.

 

[PetMed]

I could not agree more about pharmacists joining this profession for the right reason. After nearly 30 years I can honestly say I still enjoy being a pharmacist. Some patients I'd like to send elsewhere but they are still my patients. I have worked hospital and retail and agree you can't do it for the money.

 

[Traziiramate09]

You might want to look into the role of a long-term care consultant pharmacist. Low stress, you get to use your clinical knowledge, and mainly interact with nurses and facility management.

how do i get into that area?