This would get me before the Title IX Inquisition, but I'd say that's an old story and you can replace pharmacy with any job. Before I was tenured, there's some sexism involved among the senior faculty that spending all those resources on women indiscriminately would be disappointing as you'd find plenty of examples of your Rho Chi women dropping out of the workforce to raise children after status chasing. Now that I'm older, I agree to some extent, but the Rho Chi guys are no exception to dropping from the labor force as this is an equal rights era and marriage status equality (assortative mating) is in full force
🙂.
I've now think that most people (including candidates) don't really have an idea what it's like to practice or research (see the question I answered today with respect to PharmD or PhD), and you can tell by the way the question is formulated. What most are enamored with is the status rather than the work. When confronted outside the academic environment with the nature of the profession, people who made it academically don't translate that success into professional employment success and find themselves lost when the work is more "sticky" than academics, what I mean is that the longer-term consequences of pump and dump personalities starts to not pay. You can't be a status hound in a hospital as you're not all equal and not starting together, a fresh off residency pharmacist competes for the same jobs I would and we both compete with even more experienced pharmacists for better jobs. You have to consistently deliver good work, and it's Pass or Fail but the Pass bar is really high.
I know I was in the lower part of the upper tier in my pharmacy class (I barely took MCL), and there were quite a number of people ahead of me that were much more academically superior. Hilariously enough, I made a fairly substantial bet in writing with one of the admin faculty that the ones considered most successful a decade later were from my friends rather than the upper tier students. Of course, I won the bet because we all knew everyone's (lack of) working habits. It's to the people who consistently are no-drama, solid competent workers that win day in and day out over time. Intelligence, charisma, they help but aren't decisive in the way that quiet work ethic and emotionally stable contribute to longevity. If you do have the work ethic and have charisma and sense of mordant humor in particular, you'll go far in a profession with mostly colorless tools (I am proudly a member of those colorless tools). If we could select against certain neuroses, it would help, but I don't think giving the MMPI to every prospective job candidate is going to fly.
Since I see the burnout cases for pharmacy and medicine, the usual profile is:
1. Must work (so feels trapped)
2. Immediate debt-free (as in doesn't owe more than 30% of takehome pay to a mortgage, student, or revolving debt), so no imminent danger reason to work
3. Lacks coping/socialization mechanisms for work
4. Has maladapted social and private habits or sacrificed too much at home
5. (People say this about me, so I get it.) "Behind every successful pharmacist is the spouse who made it necessary."
I don't know what to say, it's like me walking into the MFA Creative Writing program at the University. Before, it was this kind of hippy sort of place where you could smell the ganja long before you entered the building with a bunch of layabouts writing with a hangover on a 1960s puke yellow couch. Now, it's this slick corporate polished environment because they're trying to sell you something, the status of being a (successful) writer, not adding in the fine print that most writers are on the Echo Spring trip (writer's euphemism for being high or recovering from a hangover) and success is on the same probability as being struck by lightning twice as most authors never complete more than their short stories and first (and last) novel.
Pharmacy and medicine both have done a bad job of screening people out that join for the status and not for the work. I'd say that's not my problem and that's their fault for not knowing, but do you understand that hiring is a special hell nowadays as it's impossible to tell with the normal HR process who is and who isn't employable over the duration? What I'm sad about is the station reports in VA about the young pharmacists quitting literally two weeks before they would make career as "it's too hard to work here" not knowing they threw away their entire status and got them 12b'ed out of a future federal job. Ah well, I suppose there's more where they came from, but I'd rather hire for longer periods to someone who just does the $*(#ing work sans drama than the flameouts that we continually see.
