PharmD -> Medical School (Ask me anything)

[pharmd2md819]

Hi all,

I graduated from pharmacy school but made the decision to transition to medical school after completing my clinical rotations. After pharmacy school, I was fortunate enough to match into a PGY-1 residency position for my gap year. I'm currently an M1. Many people (including admission committee members) would think that transitioning from pharmacy to medical school would be easy and seemingly painless, given the vast overlap in clinical knowledge base that the career paths have. However, I found this to be purely assumptive and not true at all. I am more than happy to help/provide advice/share my perspective on what the process was like when transitioning and what my concerns/major challenges were.

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[What's a few more years?]

Hi there,

Thanks for doing this. I'm also a pharmacist looking to go back to medical school. I've been out of school four years now, and am currently taking a few courses to finish some prereqs, as well as demonstrate more recent academic success because the bulk of my undergraduate coursework will be 7+ years old in 2022 when I plan to apply. I have several questions about the process and how your prior PharmD course work and experiences were considered by adcoms. Some of these answers likely vary school to school, but I would like to know your experience.

- Do you believe your PharmD had any effect on how adcoms viewed your application?

- How did adcoms view your pharmacy school coursework? Was it included in gpa calculations or separated out?

- I'm currently looking to set up physician shadowing, but I sometimes wonder what amount is really necessary for someone like myself. Throughout pharmacy school, especially P4 year, we spend many hours rounding with the medical team on various rotations. I've spent time with family med, internal med, psych, general surg, ortho, and palliative care just to name a few. While this isn't quite shadowing because I actually had a few responsibilities as a learner, I feel like this fulfills the same purpose as shadowing. I have spent considerable time with physicians in practice, and know this is a career I want to pursue. Furthermore, I work in specialty clinic with physicians and spend hours each day interacting with them. My concern is that admissions might not see it that way. Did you have traditional premed shadowing experiences in order to ensure that part of your application was complete?

- What other things would you recommend I do to round out my current application? I volunteer through church, my wife and I are foster parents, and I'm in progress to become a volunteer at a hospice house, on hold due to COVID. I'm not planning to take any time off work, so I've been completing coursework and volunteering in addition to my current full time position.

Thank you!

 

[pharmd2md819]

Hi there,

Thanks for doing this. I'm also a pharmacist looking to go back to medical school. I've been out of school four years now, and am currently taking a few courses to finish some prereqs, as well as demonstrate more recent academic success because the bulk of my undergraduate coursework will be 7+ years old in 2022 when I plan to apply. I have several questions about the process and how your prior PharmD course work and experiences were considered by adcoms. Some of these answers likely vary school to school, but I would like to know your experience.

- Do you believe your PharmD had any effect on how adcoms viewed your application?

- How did adcoms view your pharmacy school coursework? Was it included in gpa calculations or separated out?

- I'm currently looking to set up physician shadowing, but I sometimes wonder what amount is really necessary for someone like myself. Throughout pharmacy school, especially P4 year, we spend many hours rounding with the medical team on various rotations. I've spent time with family med, internal med, psych, general surg, ortho, and palliative care just to name a few. While this isn't quite shadowing because I actually had a few responsibilities as a learner, I feel like this fulfills the same purpose as shadowing. I have spent considerable time with physicians in practice, and know this is a career I want to pursue. Furthermore, I work in specialty clinic with physicians and spend hours each day interacting with them. My concern is that admissions might not see it that way. Did you have traditional premed shadowing experiences in order to ensure that part of your application was complete?

- What other things would you recommend I do to round out my current application? I volunteer through church, my wife and I are foster parents, and I'm in progress to become a volunteer at a hospice house, on hold due to COVID. I'm not planning to take any time off work, so I've been completing coursework and volunteering in addition to my current full time position.

Thank you!

- Do you believe your PharmD had any effect on how adcoms viewed your application?

This is a great question. The answer is yes and no. It's no mystery that the number of med school applications is increasing each year. Therefore, med schools have to have ways to streamline and view applications in an efficient manner and while I don't know this for fact, it appears that med schools first filter out favorable applications to view by looking at highest GPA/MCAT scores based on the past averages of accepted applicants at their institution. I can't imagine adcoms "holistically" viewing all 5000-10000 apps (and secondaries) before giving out interviews.

The reason I'm fairly confident in this assumption is because I actually applied to medical school twice. The first time was during P4 year (taking the MCAT in the summer before rotations and applying in June) and was on track to graduate with my PharmD regardless. I truly believed that my PharmD would give me a clear advantage during the cycle and my pharmacy GPA was higher than my undergrad GPA (3.68 vs. 3.8). However, my MCAT was fairly average, even below average for some schools. Nonetheless, I thought with the "holistic review" that adcoms harp on would actually happen and that the material of everything on my app would balance out my MCAT score (clinical experience, research experience, pubs during pharmacy school, volunteering experiences, solid personal statement). I applied to ~20 schools and didn't get any interviews. Also, in my opinion, a PharmD education (esp at a top pharmacy school), is much more rigorous and clinically relevant than any premed or postbacc education.

The next (and last) time I applied, these were the main differences in my application:
-my MCAT was 10 points higher (90th percentile)
-two LORs from attending physicians I worked with on P4 rotations (ID, internal medicine - inpatient) to my LOR profile vs. only having LORs from pharmacists/pharmacy faulty

I was doing my PGY1 during this cycle but I don't believe my PGY1 experience had much bearing my my chances since it wasn't included on my app.

Otherwise, I applied to essentially the same schools with the same material I had on my previous app and received 4 interviews, for which I got accepted to all of them. So yes, having a PharmD definitely helps ONLY if you have the numbers (GPA, MCAT) that help you get past that first filter for applications. I found that having a PharmD helped greatly during the interview itself since I was able to draw a lot on pharmacy (clinical, school) experience for questions that required examples specific to your prior experiences or ethics questions, teaching/mentorship, etc. Overall, from my experience, my PharmD didn't seem as big of an impact as I thought it would.

To give more context, I graduated from one of the top 5 (maybe top 3 now?) pharmacy schools in the country and graduated with high distinction and this was my overall experience with the process.

- How did adcoms view your pharmacy school coursework? Was it included in gpa calculations or separated out?

This is also a really great question that I honestly don't have the answer to and I can only tell you what I think. And what I think is that it varies greatly, and I know that's far from a helpful answer. My observation is that a lot of the individuals on adcoms do not come from clinical backgrounds and have only experience within medical school administration or have master's degree in administration. With that being said, many may not even know the full scope of what pharmacists actually do (e.g. managed care, amb care, ID, cardiology, oncology) other than knowing the pharmacists that operate in retail settings and stereotypically "count and push pills." So when I inputted the grades I got from medchem courses or grades from clinical rotations, to this day, I still don't know what bearing it had on my application.

I will share this one experience I had though. I remember going to a premed fair, where there were >50 med schools represented with adcom from all over the country. While most school adcom reps said something nonspecific like "that's great, I think that will definitely help on you app" (which honestly means nothing to me), one individual who was the head of the admcom committee for one school (he was a PhD), he straight up told me that they don't even know what to do with GPAs if I were to input them on AMCAS. TLDR, I still don't know to this day, but it's more than discouraging and unfair that the GPA we attain in pharmacy school may not help as much.

However, I would overjoyed if anyone reading over what I've wrote can dismiss my assumptions.

- I'm currently looking to set up physician shadowing, but I sometimes wonder what amount is really necessary for someone like myself. Throughout pharmacy school, especially P4 year, we spend many hours rounding with the medical team on various rotations. I've spent time with family med, internal med, psych, general surg, ortho, and palliative care just to name a few. While this isn't quite shadowing because I actually had a few responsibilities as a learner, I feel like this fulfills the same purpose as shadowing. I have spent considerable time with physicians in practice, and know this is a career I want to pursue. Furthermore, I work in specialty clinic with physicians and spend hours each day interacting with them. My concern is that admissions might not see it that way. Did you have traditional premed shadowing experiences in order to ensure that part of your application was complete?

Great question. I totally agree that the time we spend with physicians as pharmacy students is much more valuable as a run-of-the-mill premed that has no clinical knowledge shadowing since we know that P4 students can have impactful clinical interventions on rotations that physicians do not catch. However, adcoms (working under the assumption that they don't have little/no clinical background or know what a pharmacy education entails) may not know that P4s spend literally hundred of hours with physicians, even though you would think it's a given.

As a result and to play it safe, I used one of the boxes for extracurricular activities on AMCAS designated specifically for shadowing experiences to check that box for apps.


- What other things would you recommend I do to round out my current application? I volunteer through church, my wife and I are foster parents, and I'm in progress to become a volunteer at a hospice house, on hold due to COVID. I'm not planning to take any time off work, so I've been completing coursework and volunteering in addition to my current full time position.

I would also try to have (if you can) have research experiences and leadership experiences on your app as well to "check the box" so to speak. I know some people would strongly advise against doing things to essentially just "check the box" but at the same time as well, there's a reason why the vast majority of accepted applicants have these experiences, as they are pertinent to what a career in medicine entails. However, if you're not able to attain these experiences, I would definitely put more emphasis on trying to get your MCAT score as high as you can and play up your clinical/volunteering experiences from your pharmacy background in your personal statement, extracurriculars, etc. The good thing is that things that research are not required" but rather "strongly recommended". Also, espeically being a foster parent and having a real job during this pandemic, I can definitely see starting a research experience being difficult for you, if not improbable to do, vs. focusing on something else more tangible. Regardless, if you don't have a good enough MCAT, having >10 research experiences won't get you far at all. If you've precepted pharmacy students whether it be for rotation or volunteering events, any lectures/presentations you've given, I would definitely include them. I included every volunteering event I did from P1-P4 year (blood pressure screenings, immunizations, health fairs, health education, etc). I can imagine that your experience as a foster parent is another layer of complexity to your character that you may want to play up, whether it be on the primary or secondary apps.

Another thing to maybe boost your app a bit is perfecting and including your CV in the secondary app portal for additional reference docs for adcoms. Typically, a premed's CV is borderline nonexistent (1-2 pages at best), whereas a CV for someone with a PharmD degree is expected to be much more substantial. Your CV can help present some of the things that you did that may not be fully apparent on the AMCAS application itself, such as P4 rotations.

Lastly, if you can as well, I would try to attain LORs from physicians you worked with on rotation/interacted with as a pharmacist. I'm not entirely sure how much impact it will have but it surely can't hurt to have them. It appears that MD/DO LORs may be more favored than LORs from just PharmDs from my experience. I anticipate that you plan on, if not already, have asked the physicians at the specialty office where you work at, for LORs. When applying to certain schools, I would triple check what LOR requirements they may have, since some of them require a letter from a science faculty member of sorts. I had my Medchem professor write me one for my app. If you're doing coursework right now, definitely try to get an LOR from one of your professors to check that box and cover that req.

Sorry for the long reply but I'll be glad to clarify what I written above if need be!