Should I go to pharmacy school?

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HeNeedsSomeMilk

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I have been accepted to a pharmacy school in new york city (liu). I know that the saturation for pharmacy is bad and will get worse. I had some experience at an independent pharmacy and liked the environment. My GPA is around 3.5 and I just completed only 2 years of college(completed most of the sciences courses like ochem). I have around 11k in loans and would probably increase to 150k if I get out of pharmacy school. On top of that, I don't come from a financial well off family(single child). Any suggestions or thoughts or should I pursue something else? And stoichiometrist I know what you're going to say and don't ask me to go to engineer or accounting major.
 
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I would recommend pursuing something else that has a great job outlook after graduation.
 
You predicted what I was going to say. NYC has tons of jobs in finance and computer programming as well.

If you don't mind being in loads of debt with poor job prospects and being forced to BFE to land a full time position (assuming that those aren't taken by the time you graduate), then pharmacy is for you.
 
If you like health care, check job market for pa/np, occupation therapist, speech therapist... just to name a few... id also strongly look into DO school, it's a sacrifice but when you can have a long career unlike chain pharmacist...

Agree on DO school, i regret not spending time to research on it. And i heard PA is also heading in same direction as pharmacy. Its not saturated now but will be in next 10 years or something.
 
Agree on DO school, i regret not spending time to research on it. And i heard PA is also heading in same direction as pharmacy. Its not saturated now but will be in next 10 years or something.

I think the scary part about our profession is that 70% is outpatient that is dictated by insurance companies, and there is such a big movement for merger, mail order, scare of amazon, etc. It's becoming more than just problem of over-saturation, although that is still our main concern.

I don't know enough about PA, but there is twice as many applicants to PA program compared to pharm.d at my school. That proly tells you something... Nowadays, with the cost of tution and residency becoming almost a must, it's hard not to seriously consider DO and even Caribbean med schools, IMO.
 
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My wife is about to graduate PA school this August and it's unbelievable the difference between the job market in her field versus pharmacy (mine). While I consider myself lucky to even have a retail job in southern West Virginia for a company I interned with for 3 years, she can practically go wherever she wants and work in any specialty. If I had to do it all over again, which is also my recommendation to you, I would totally opt for being a PA over pharmacist.
 
I will also agree with the other posters who advised you to apply to PA school. Yes, the job market for PAs will be saturated eventually, but that point (based on gov't. projections) is still a good 7-8 years away. If you apply now or even next year to PA schools, you will still graduate ~5 years ahead of the saturation critical point. Also, I'm not that familiar with the specifics, but legislation is being proposed that will substantially expand PAs' scope of practice (think independent practice or close to it), and unlike most pharmacy-specific legislation, it actually has a realistic chance of being voted on by Congress and becoming law.

I forget what it's called (again, I've only briefly researched this), but a few PA programs have started offering additional degree programs that are intended to prepare PAs to work independently. There are even residency program in the PA profession that usually lead to better job opportunities and higher salaries. I have no idea if this is the case in other parts of the country, but in the southeast, PAs who have completed a 1-year residency are typically offered salaries that a PA with 4-5 years of experience make.

Heck, if you decide you want to go back to medical school at some point, there is even a 3-year PA-to-DO bridge program (you get to skip the first year of basic science courses).

Here's an approach you can take to help make your decision: if you shadow both pharmacists and PAs and realize that you like both careers just as much as one another and would be just as happy doing either one, go to PA school. Unless you absolutely cannot be fulfilled by doing anything other than pharmacy and are willing to uproot yourself and move to the most rural, disenfranchised regions of the US to satisfy this passion, do not go to pharmacy school.
 
I recently graduated and went through the job hunt process. In my experience, it isn't particularly easy or particularly difficult to get a job. You may have to move for a job depending on what path you take. A lot of the people having trouble finding jobs want to work in a large city, are set on hospital positions without residency training, or, like me, are residency match rejects that missed the boat on retail applications. I still found a job that I'm good at and that I absolutely love.

If you are looking for a guaranteed 100K salary, an easy job application process, and a great deal of flexibility in terms of job location, you could probably find a better career. On the other hand, if you love pharmacy, go for it. You will be able to find a job.
 
I have been accepted to a pharmacy school in new york city (liu). I know that the saturation for pharmacy is bad and will get worse. I had some experience at an independent pharmacy and liked the environment. My GPA is around 3.5 and I just completed only 2 years of college(completed most of the sciences courses like ochem). I have around 11k in loans and would probably increase to 150k if I get out of pharmacy school. On top of that, I don't come from a financial well off family(single child). Any suggestions or thoughts or should I pursue something else? And stoichiometrist I know what you're going to say and don't ask me to go to engineer or accounting major.

If you are fairly young, you may consider attending, especially if you're single and don't have any attachments. Be prepared to move out of state.

"He's alive!"
My old friend. How are you?
 
If you are fairly young, you may consider attending, especially if you're single and don't have any attachments. Be prepared to move out of state.

My old friend. How are you?

Not bad, especially now that I have gotten the hell out of pharmacy. Looking forward to pursuing something more promising. How are you?
 
I gotta give him credit for decisively going with his decision. Better than playing the "it's everyone else's fault," game later on, regretting his decision, and forcing his way through pharmacy when he's already made up his mind.

I have absolutely no regret about my decision to leave pharmacy school. At least when I was kicked out of AA school, I did feel some form of remorse that suggested I had blown a good opportunity, but by leaving pharmacy, I don't feel like I'm giving up anything worthwhile whatsoever.
 
I have absolutely no regret about my decision to leave pharmacy school. At least when I was kicked out of AA school, I did feel some form of remorse that suggested I had blown a good opportunity, but by leaving pharmacy, I don't feel like I'm giving up anything worthwhile whatsoever.

You were kicked out of AA school? I thought you failed one class and decided it wasn't for you so you dropped out?

I can't keep it straight. So you were kicked out of one program and have dropped out of another but you think you should stick around here telling pharmacists how bad their jobs are? You are too much. Please keep us up to date on your shenanagens going forward, they are really quite interesting.
 
You were kicked out of AA school? I thought you failed one class and decided it wasn't for you so you dropped out?

I can't keep it straight. So you were kicked out of one program and have dropped out of another but you think you should stick around here telling pharmacists how bad their jobs are? You are too much. Please keep us up to date on your shenanagens going forward, they are really quite interesting.

I failed a single class and would have had to start the whole program over (not dismissed, which takes failing 2 classes and results in the student being prohibited from returning to the program), and in the meantime I developed the delusion that pharmacy could be a good choice moving forward. In a way, I'm glad I dabbled in pharmacy for a short time, because it gave me an idea of just how bad of a deal a career pursuit can be and showed me how valuable of an opportunity AA school was. The fact that someone with my academic history is is willing to risk dropping out of pharmacy school, getting rejected from AA schools, and being left with no viable career prospects should be a testament to just how much of a dead-end career goal pharmacy is. I'm simply choosing to do NOW what I would be doing anyways if I had decided to finish pharmacy school, except that I'll save at least $100k worth of debt and 3 more years of wasted time.

I'm not keeping anyone here updated on anything. It's a waste of time for me, and I don't feel like arguing with delusional pharmacists who are simply going to accuse me of making **** up when I post anything that suggests that I'm actually making progress towards achieving something better than pharmacy. I guess that's how people in this field rationalize what their chosen profession has devolved into... they simply choose to insist that I'll fail at whatever I choose to pursue, because somebody like me basically doesn't have the right to pursue anything better than pharmacy, right?

Yeah, whatever. At this point, visiting the forums here is kind of like driving past a bloody accident scene just a few more times before you continue driving down the road, just because you feel like you might as well take in the sheer level of chaos and tragedy one more time.

BTW, I'm not the one telling pharmacists how bad their jobs are. The few members who actually have FT pharmacist jobs are doing a good enough job of that on their own, and it wouldn't make sense for me to remind all the other members here since it sounds like the majority of all the rest can't even find pharmacist jobs in the first place.
 
I would NOT recommend pharmacy school! You would probably end up in a large chain environment and take it from experience---you would be very frustrated!


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The fact that someone with my academic history is is willing to risk dropping out of pharmacy school, getting rejected from AA schools, and being left with no viable career prospects should be a testament to just how much of a dead-end career goal pharmacy is.

It is a testament to something.
 
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It is a testament to something.

I'll put it another way. With my background, there is definitely the chance that I will never again be accepted to a health professions program that accepts applicants on the basis of a competitive admissions process... and yet, I would rather take that chance than condemn myself to what my most likely future in pharmacy would be. THAT shows you just how bad the whole pharmacy "situation" is (job market, quality of life, work conditions, etc.), and how bleak the future looks.
 
It really doesn't though. It says a lot more about you than it does about Pharmacy.

Exactly, it shows that I don't want to be a pharmacist badly enough to risk dealing with what the job market, quality of work, and other factors have/will become. Maybe there are people out there who want to be pharmacists so badly that they would be happy to move to a BFE wasteland just to have the "privilege" of working 30 hrs/week as a pharmacist, but that's not me. I can't think of anything I want to do that badly.

However, the fact that I'm not willing to risk going into pharmacy doesn't mean that the profession hasn't objectively gotten worse, that the job market doesn't suck and isn't getting worse, and that the "leadership" in pharmacy isn't committed to doing nothing absolutely nothing to improve those factors.
 
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I'll save at least $100k worth of debt and 3 more years of wasted time.
I think you made the right choice for you; however, since you are either pre-pharmacy or a P1 you probably aren't the best resource and may not have a lot of relevant insight for people further along in their career. Good luck! I think you'll have an easy time finding something you're more passionate about.
 
What are your career goals? What does your ideal job look like? How many different professionals have you shadowed and which shadowing experience did you enjoy the most? What are you really good at? What subjects at school really interested you? Are there any activities that you feel like you can get "lost in" - something you enjoy doing so much that you lose track of time and even forget to eat? What are you passionate about? Do you have any role models, and if so, what kind of work do your role models do?

Pharmacy school can be a stressful experience, as well as it's a huge investment of time and money. You will likely have to either do post-graduate training (residency or fellowship) and/or move around the country in order to find full-time work. In my humble opinion, traditional pharmacy work isn't the most stimulating or fulfilling work, and there will be days where you might feel like a glorified DEA minion or a diabetes enabler. Pharmacists don't have a lot of autonomy in most practice settings, and most of our "interventions" are fixing other prescribers' sloppy work. Being a pharmacist has its moments where you do feel like you've made a difference, and no doubt you do get compensated well for your work. Nonetheless, burnout is common in retail - it can be a difficult work environment to thrive in. There is some flexibility to what kind of work you can do as a PharmD outside of retail (e.g. hospital, long term care, managed care, industry, academia, government, consulting, informatics/health IT), but those jobs are harder to come by and are usually not entry level (some hospital staffing jobs being the main exception). You will likely have to go above and beyond just having a PharmD (postgraduate training, another advanced degree, exceptional networking skills, etc.) in order to get a job outside of traditional pharmacy (some of it is also just dumb luck and knowing the right people at the right place at the right time).

Should you go to pharmacy school? It all comes down to what your priorities are and what you are willing to risk to accomplish your career goals. If you think you will do well academically in pharmacy school, and are willing to move to a town where you have no friends or family in order to work a retail pharmacy or hospital pharmacy job, then I would say pharmacy school is still worthwhile. If you are not sure, I would highly encourage you shadow many different health care professionals or even professionals outside of healthcare. Pharmacy school is 4 years of your life and $100k+ you will never get back - are you willing to risk all that in order to potentially end up working in retail in a less-than-ideal geographic location? Do you want to be a pharmacist badly enough to take that kind of risk?
 
I have absolutely no regret about my decision to leave pharmacy school. At least when I was kicked out of AA school, I did feel some form of remorse that suggested I had blown a good opportunity, but by leaving pharmacy, I don't feel like I'm giving up anything worthwhile whatsoever.

Self fulfilling prophecy. I can assure you your RX career would have most likely turned ugly. So glad you have the foresight to cut losses and focus on more fruitful paths. I considered walking too, but my own self fulfilling prophecy came true and my career appears to be going smooth, 4 years post grad.
 
Self fulfilling prophecy. I can assure you your RX career would have most likely turned ugly. So glad you have the foresight to cut losses and focus on more fruitful paths. I considered walking too, but my own self fulfilling prophecy came true and my career appears to be going smooth, 4 years post grad.

Thanks. Out of random curiosity, why do you think my RX career would have turned ugly? Because of the job market and work conditions getting worse, or because you think I personally would have been a failure at pharmacy?
 
Thanks. Out of random curiosity, why do you think my RX career would have turned ugly? Because of the job market and work conditions getting worse, or because you think I personally would have been a failure at pharmacy?

Your well-placed negativity (based in reality of your location/debt) would most likely envelope your day to day work and job hunt. How are you supposed to succeed at a career or even interview for a job when you hate the profession and truly feel it offers almost nothing to you. It would naturally seep out. Because so many on this board and in practice are "pharmacy champions" they would most likely strike you down hard. You could probably do the work just fine. Work conditions across many jobs are declining, but the debt load isn't soaring as much as RX.

If I was in your shoes today I'd walk, but I began my RX journey in 2005 as a tech. I'm from BFE area, will most likely stay there, graduated from a cheap in state school debt free and had my share of sign on bonuses already. Haven't made the cool Mil yet but I am trying!
 
What are your career goals? What does your ideal job look like? How many different professionals have you shadowed and which shadowing experience did you enjoy the most? What are you really good at? What subjects at school really interested you? Are there any activities that you feel like you can get "lost in" - something you enjoy doing so much that you lose track of time and even forget to eat? What are you passionate about? Do you have any role models, and if so, what kind of work do your role models do?

Pharmacy school can be a stressful experience, as well as it's a huge investment of time and money. You will likely have to either do post-graduate training (residency or fellowship) and/or move around the country in order to find full-time work. In my humble opinion, traditional pharmacy work isn't the most stimulating or fulfilling work, and there will be days where you might feel like a glorified DEA minion or a diabetes enabler. Pharmacists don't have a lot of autonomy in most practice settings, and most of our "interventions" are fixing other prescribers' sloppy work. Being a pharmacist has its moments where you do feel like you've made a difference, and no doubt you do get compensated well for your work. Nonetheless, burnout is common in retail - it can be a difficult work environment to thrive in. There is some flexibility to what kind of work you can do as a PharmD outside of retail (e.g. hospital, long term care, managed care, industry, academia, government, consulting, informatics/health IT), but those jobs are harder to come by and are usually not entry level (some hospital staffing jobs being the main exception). You will likely have to go above and beyond just having a PharmD (postgraduate training, another advanced degree, exceptional networking skills, etc.) in order to get a job outside of traditional pharmacy (some of it is also just dumb luck and knowing the right people at the right place at the right time).

Should you go to pharmacy school? It all comes down to what your priorities are and what you are willing to risk to accomplish your career goals. If you think you will do well academically in pharmacy school, and are willing to move to a town where you have no friends or family in order to work a retail pharmacy or hospital pharmacy job, then I would say pharmacy school is still worthwhile. If you are not sure, I would highly encourage you shadow many different health care professionals or even professionals outside of healthcare. Pharmacy school is 4 years of your life and $100k+ you will never get back - are you willing to risk all that in order to potentially end up working in retail in a less-than-ideal geographic location? Do you want to be a pharmacist badly enough to take that kind of risk?

^^^ Listen to this guy, especially when he talks about asking yourself whether you'd be willing to move to an undesirable area just to get a FT job doing the work you're about to spend 4 years of school and at least $100k to train for. For many of us, location is an important enough factor so as to be a deal-breaker for certain professions, and if you can't imagine moving yourself to some BFE town in the midwest where you don't know a single person and where you don't enjoy living in general (for a variety of factors -- no restaurants, no nightlife, no public amenities, whatever), then you need to ask yourself if you want to be a pharmacist *THAT* badly. Also, keep in mind that more and more pharmacists graduate every year, so pretty soon, even having a willingness to move to a BFE craptown might not work as a guaranteed fall-back plan. Like giga advises in his post, definitely shadow other healthcare professionals.

Consider shadowing a PA/NP or CRNA (you've only completed 2 years of college, so you could still switch to nursing and not lose much time, if any at all). I would say to shadow an AA as well, but you obviously won't find any of them where you are since they can't become licensed in NY/NJ. If you do decide to pursue any of these professions, just don't waste any time doing so in order to avoid entering them during the saturation phase (you should still be 7-8 years ahead of the curve at this point).
 
^^^ Listen to this guy, especially when he talks about asking yourself whether you'd be willing to move to an undesirable area just to get a FT job doing the work you're about to spend 4 years of school and at least $100k to train for. For many of us, location is an important enough factor so as to be a deal-breaker for certain professions, and if you can't imagine moving yourself to some BFE town in the midwest where you don't know a single person and where you don't enjoy living in general (for a variety of factors -- no restaurants, no nightlife, no public amenities, whatever), then you need to ask yourself if you want to be a pharmacist *THAT* badly. Also, keep in mind that more and more pharmacists graduate every year, so pretty soon, even having a willingness to move to a BFE craptown might not work as a guaranteed fall-back plan. Like giga advises in his post, definitely shadow other healthcare professionals.

Consider shadowing a PA/NP or CRNA (you've only completed 2 years of college, so you could still switch to nursing and not lose much time, if any at all). I would say to shadow an AA as well, but you obviously won't find any of them where you are since they can't become licensed in NY/NJ. If you do decide to pursue any of these professions, just don't waste any time doing so in order to avoid entering them during the saturation phase (you should still be 7-8 years ahead of the curve at this point).


I just find it funny you are giving advice on pharmacy. The same advice was given to you and you chose to ignore it because your medium sized city had plenty of job openings. With the current market it only takes one class to fully saturate a medium sized city, that is the reality when ~400 a year are graduating in the state alone.

Also don't pretend to know when the saturation phase is for other healthcare professionals. I've heard bad things about pharmacy job market (and thought them myself) since 2010 but honestly 7 and a half years later it doesn't seem much worse then it was then. I certainly expected there to be more unemployed pharmacists at this point and for the pay to drop. While the pay has dropped in a lot of places for new grads, the staff already there are doing just fine. Most likely because there isn't enough of a surplus to completely clean house of the effective pharmacists. I don't put it past these big corporations if we see double digit unemployment to start cutting the higher paid pharmacists salary or telling them to walk if they don't like it. A lot of people don't see it that way though, but business is all about making money and if there are 100's of people willing to take your job, they will come for that money.
 
I just find it funny you are giving advice on pharmacy. The same advice was given to you and you chose to ignore it because your medium sized city had plenty of job openings. With the current market it only takes one class to fully saturate a medium sized city, that is the reality when ~400 a year are graduating in the state alone.

Also don't pretend to know when the saturation phase is for other healthcare professionals. I've heard bad things about pharmacy job market (and thought them myself) since 2010 but honestly 7 and a half years later it doesn't seem much worse then it was then. I certainly expected there to be more unemployed pharmacists at this point and for the pay to drop. While the pay has dropped in a lot of places for new grads, the staff already there are doing just fine. Most likely because there isn't enough of a surplus to completely clean house of the effective pharmacists. I don't put it past these big corporations if we see double digit unemployment to start cutting the higher paid pharmacists salary or telling them to walk if they don't like it. A lot of people don't see it that way though, but business is all about making money and if there are 100's of people willing to take your job, they will come for that money.

There are only 400 pharmacists graduating every year in GA? I thought the number would be way higher than that (I figured 150 for Mercer, 120-150 for both South and PCOM or possibly more, and then 75 for UGA, which pushes the number to 500/year or more). I know that in my area, there have been pharmacist firings in hospitals (haven't heard about that happening in retail yet), and two of the hospital pharmacists I mentioned knowing on here just retired literally within the last 2 weeks because of unspecified changes that are coming down the pipeline that they said they weren't willing to put up with. The hospital they formerly worked for hasn't hired a pharmacist in about 4 years (they just keep bringing in more residents instead to save $$), so maybe that has something to do with it. I have no idea though.

I just told the OP that PA/NP/CRNA should be safe for 7-8 more years because everyone on the forum likes to reference the HRSA job saturation report, which indicates that those professions' job markets are likely to get saturated around 2025. So I just said that to be safe and if the OP wants to pursue one of those professions, they should do it *NOW* and not waste time so that they don't end up entering the profession when it's already saturated.

Then again, all three of those professions (PA/NP/CRNA) have legislative proposals in the pipeline that have the potential to expand their scope of practice and create more job opportunities, and they actually have a legitimate chance of making it through the legislative process and being written into law (unlike any piece of pharmacy-related legislation), so that's something to consider as well.

In regards to pharmacy, I do have to wonder how many more classes will have to graduate from schools in GA only to face unemployment before enrollment numbers start going down. If it only took the c/o 2016 to immediately saturate every medium-sized city in GA, then imagine how much worse things are going to get as the same number of pharmacists graduates every May from this point on.
 
after further research uga and mercer both put out mid 140s (not all graduate) so lets call it 280. PCOM is about 80 (was taking 110)and south is apparently about 50 people.
 
after further research uga and mercer both put out mid 140s (not all graduate) so lets call it 280. PCOM is about 80 (was taking 110)and south is apparently about 50 people.

Thanks for clarifying. I'm surprised that PCOM and South don't accept more than that.
 
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It really doesn't though. It says a lot more about you than it does about Pharmacy.
@PAtoPharm
Easy-Home-Remedies-For-Minor-Burns.jpg
 
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Yeah, make sure to save an extra roll of gauze for giga and everyone else who takes, you know, the common-sense attitude that maybe a profession with a job market that is coming dangerously close to mandating a move to BFE just to find a job isn't for everyone.

... Wait a second, aren't you the guy who said he had to move to BFE to find a job, can't find a job in a nicer area despite having experience because there are none, who walks around Walmart on Friday/Saturday nights for entertainment, and who said that sometimes it sucks to suck? If so, you might want to save some of that gauze for yourself. (although I could be thinking of another user with a similar screenname)
 
Yeah, make sure to save an extra roll of gauze for giga and everyone else who takes, you know, the common-sense attitude that maybe a profession with a job market that is coming dangerously close to mandating a move to BFE just to find a job isn't for everyone.

Alright, I just want to set the record straight - although I have no delusions about the pharmacist job market, I do not share the same overall position as you do about the pharmacy profession. Overall, I am quite happy with where I ended up as a pharmacist, and I think there are still some great things one can do as a pharmacist if one is ambitious enough. I just want the OP to have realistic expectations about what it means to pursue a career in pharmacy these days, which is that finding a job will require more sacrifices (usually in the form of postgraduate training or making a geographic move or both) than it has in the recent past. I have no plans of leaving the pharmacy profession anytime soon, so no need to save me an extra roll of gauze.
 
BFE? Base Flood Elevation? A lot of coastal areas, including large sections of Manhattan and Miami, are at or below BFE. It probably is a good idea to watch out for this because of flood insurance rates in those areas.

People are either getting hazed for their beach homes, or I am missing something 🙂
 
BFE? Base Flood Elevation? A lot of coastal areas, including large sections of Manhattan and Miami, are at or below BFE. It probably is a good idea to watch out for this because of flood insurance rates in those areas.

People are either getting hazed for their beach homes, or I am missing something 🙂

In this case, BFE stands for Bumf***, Egypt (used to denote a rural, middle-of-nowhere area). Considering what the job market looks like, I'm obviously not referring to any BFE that includes Miami or Manhattan.
 
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