Good news:
You write in relatively standard, grammatical English. That's more than 85% of the ones I read.
A couple of points (and this will read harshly, sorry):
1. Your essay reads extremely generically. Except for the above (at least this is in English) matter, this repeats exactly what I (and most of the faculty) have heard from so many others, but do not live up to those standards once in or past pharmacy school. This is a personal statement, so I already know that you want to go to pharmacy school and that you have some arguably basic interests and competencies in the subject matter. You do need to mention them, but in the way that you do, they do not personalize the reasons for going to pharmacy school to you, which if this is also a Statement of Intent, would probably be rejected.
Take this paragraph:
Upon completion of the Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 semesters, I had made a name for myself in both the Chemistry and Biology departments. Many students and friends of mine would kindly ask for my assistance in certain subjects, and I would gladly assist them without asking for any kind of payment/compensation. Why did science, in general, become easy for me? Simply put, I understand the dedication it takes to succeed. I love to build my knowledge in both biology and chemistry; there is always more and more that you can learn. This challenged me to be even more dedicated, because I knew that assisting other students so that they could excel in their courses would help them to succeed. In my opinion, when all students are in a focused mindset and willing to learn, the learning environment is much more pure and one will feel much more dedicated. I understand the importance of surrounding oneself with peers who are as dedicated, as this will raise morale and dedication exponentially.
Let us read this critically. Did you actually tutor students in a demonstrable way? What happened when you did? Yes, you would need to discuss course performance within this paragraph, particularly for the OChem and AChem (if required for the program). How does knowledge of the sciences relate to how you interact with the world at this point? Remember, the point of the personal statement is to cast these qualifications in a way that personalizes the numbers I read on the Ad Com to you.
2. Revise these non-quantitative sentences. You might want to refrain from writing about mechanism of action here. There's a bit more specificity on how the NRTI and NNRTI's work (and boy is that a Board question), and that is not all how they work (and you will have to learn how they work and the differences).
For example, I learned the course of the HIV Virus, and that certain reverse transcriptase inhibitors can block this virus from replicating by mimicking DNA in the human body. I also learned a ton of information regarding immunology, with an interest in vaccines and immunizations. I am still researching pharmacy as a whole, and with each day of research I am gaining new knowledge about the field.
Recast this into something like:
During high school, I learned about the HIV virus with some details on treatment. In my freshman Human Biology class, we briefly touched on different approaches to HIV treatment. As I advanced in the biology and biochemistry series, these increasing level of detail and distinction interests me as while I have seen breathy references to a future cure or vaccine for HIV infection, this has not happened as of yet, and as I learn the details on how complex this disease really is, I know I want to learn more as although science advances, there always will be diseases where knowing the details makes all the difference in being able to help people.
Again, personalize, but also, your idea is sound, but cast this in a way that you are not done, but want to grow further.
3. The final paragraph should be a soft sell on why the school should take you. This paragraph is not supported anywhere else in your essay.
I believe that many health care professionals undoubtedly lack the empathy for their patients. In my experience, many medical doctors will simply treat a patient, and then go on to treat the next without any sort of personal communication/empathy. What I do understand is that certain treatments can be very taxing on a patient’s mental and physical capacity. I am committed to being the Pharmacist that will smile at every patient who is ill, and provide them with the perfect treatment so that they will soon be able to smile back. Being able to see a drastic transformation in a patient will be the greatest pleasure of being a Pharmacist, due to the fact that the patient can go home and smile with family members by their side. My greatest motivation as a Pharmacist is not to just prevent death, but to improve the patient’s overall quality of life!
So, if you scatter instances of empathy throughout the essay and the end with a revised form of this that unconsciously reads as "You want to take me as a pharmacist because I have a heart" (don't write this!!!), that can work. But you cannot make such an argument a hard sell like this without supporting evidence and expect me or any other reader to not immediately dismiss it.
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The Professor in me:
1. The usual form of these essays should be of the thesis/antithesis/synthesis form. You don't have to (and actually if you are a decent writer, you should not) write an explicit thesis statement. The entire essay should make the thesis apparent. If your writing is not advanced enough to do this by implication, then write the explicit thesis statement. Patternwise, the recommended form is "I want to be a health-care professional", the antithesis is "But I am not one yet, but you can help me get there by admitting me", and the synthesis is "By helping me, you are helping the profession, the public, and yourself improve" or something to that effect. There are many, many different ways to approach this, but that is the standard pattern.
2. If you happen to end up in an admission committee, consider reading "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" before reading a bunch of personal statements. You are looking for someone who fits that profile in some form. Not necessarily like Albert Schweitzer or Mother Theresa (my advice is that someone should instantly reject applications if they read like that), but someone who is self-aware enough to struggle with identity at some level, like we are now with the fact that we are pharmacists and yet life still sucks 🙂. And it can be as straightforward as "I'm poor, pharmacy is an indoor job that pays well and has dignity, and I want some of that." The only applications that I frankly would read that promise to save the world without worldly experience in doing so are BSW applicants, and they learn soon enough...
Gripe: And, most pharmacists (and I accuse the clinical pharmacists in particular) write like ****. The only reason VHACO does not routinely send Business Compliance notices to Clinical Coordinators is that pharmacist notes do not matter for billing purposes, thus Compliance would not have a stake. But if you cannot communicate that information succinctly and in logical order, then what you bill for will not matter as audit challenges would always fail. We do take the Physicians and Dentists to task for not documenting their decision-making properly as their failure to write does cost the hospital money.
