So you've already paid tuition for this semester... what's your plan to transition out? Or are you going to stay in school? What's the plan?
I'm still looking into my options and making sure I have a dead-set career path to pursue before I withdraw. Everyone on the forum says that I'm just "all over the place" with listing so many potential alternative careers, but that is exactly my point -- I'm brainstorming alternatives. Different "plan B" careers have different advantages and disadvantages. For example, if I apply to PA or direct-entry NP programs (no nursing education/experience required), that means taking out substantial additional debt, but I'd be graduating in 2019 or 2020 to a six-figure income (or close to it), well before those professions reach their own nuclear apocalypse job market scenarios. I'd also have the flexibility of working in a variety of different specialties and subspecialties. Also, if I want to increase my expertise and earning power, I can apply to PA residencies; they are just one year long, and supposedly, graduates of such residencies are typically offered starting salaries that PAs with 5 years of experience with the same employer would make. However, the debt load for tuition would be large, and I'd almost definitely have to move away to attend the program, which means taking out even MORE debt to pay for living expenses.
On the other hand, there's the option to do a nuclear med tech program. Their starting salaries might not be quite as high as what PAs earn, but they're fairly close to those of PAs who work in primary care, and the schooling would take less than 2 years to complete. Of course, there is less flexibility with this career since a nuclear med tech is a nuclear med tech, and the program I'd attend is a B.S. degree program, so I'd have to either take out private loans to pay for it or go on some sort of payment plan offered by the university so I can work part time during the program and pay off the tuition as I complete the schooling. On the other hand, the tuition is only $25k and I'd be able to live at home, so I shouldn't have to take out more than $30k total in loans to complete the program.
... So these are just two examples of the kinds of career-career comparisons I've been doing. I can keep going if you are a glutton for punishment and want to read more, but I think you get the idea. I recently started looking into perfusionist programs, some of which only take 12 months to complete and cost less than $20k in total tuition and fees, and starting salaries are in the $80k-$100k range. It would obviously be a good idea to shadow someone in this profession. Within the next week or so, I want to have a concrete "plan B" I can set in place to pursue.
Pretty sure from what I've read the plan is to leave the program. From there, there seems to be a dozen paths, each one as unsure as the other.
See above. For the last week I have simply been in the process of comparing and contrasting various alternative careers. I don't get why people think it's such a bad thing to do this. Is someone supposed to instantly decide on something else without comparing the various professions to each other?
Of course that would be the ideal career, but there's simply zero possibility of me getting accepted anywhere. That's ok, I know you couldn't resist making a joke (neither can I, sometimes).
You've cursed yourself dude: you're 30 yrs old, in debt, poor work ethic, multiple professional schools, and about to jump ship to another. Must be hard to grasp....
But hey, I'm sure jumping ship to another professional school will fix all of that. Only makes logical sense, right?
There is no alternative since I don't currently have any marketable qualifications to my name. Here is something I think people don't get -- every other career in healthcare (even those that are heading down the road to saturation) is at least WAY better off than pharmacy is right now by a huge margin, so choosing almost any other career would be a smart idea. I think this is why I've been so "all over the place," because any of the alternative careers I've mentioned could be good choices when you compare them to the state of the pharmacy job market (both present and future).
If you get through any program first and realize OH NO! Nursing SUCKS and is not for me!
People on SDN don't say you won't make it into healthcare. Your work ethic and the personality you exude on this forum makes me believe you won't make it anywhere in the professional world. You may have intelligence, but tons of people do and make use of it. You're never too old to go into a profession you enjoy. Everyone in my family advanced in their education or changed careers in their 30s/40s. BUT. They didn't whine and complain about it. They went out and worked hard for it.
I suggest you stop complaining and making up hypothetical situations that may or may not happen. Not many people predicted the election of our current president and the things he'd do, but IT HAPPENED.
The PA/NP years may be ok now, but you are wasting these good years by taking no action. Eventually it will get saturated, and you won't get a single piece of the glory if you idle. When you actually become something, you can post here and prove us wrong.
I have to echo what I said above to PharmDBro2017. Out of all the health professions' job markets, pharmacy is in the worst shape and also has the most negative outlook by a huge margin. To me, doing something else basically just feels like an element of pragmatism, unless someone just really enjoys going up against the odds because they want to prove a point about how determined and hard-working they are. Look at it like this: yes, you could work ultra hard to secure a future 30 hrs/week floater position at CVS or Walgreens in the future, or you could pursue basically any other healthcare career (for the time being), put in a "normal" amount of hard work, and that's enough for someone to be successful.
For example, right now, the anesthesia job market is still pretty good, so someone who goes to AA school or CRNA school just has to pass the classes, do ok during their clinical rotations, and graduate, and they'll have a job. But what if the anesthesia job market in 5 years is just as saturated as the pharmacist job is now/is becoming? Then the AA/CRNA students might have to start working part time or PRN shifts as anesthesia techs in hospitals to show how bad they want to get a job in the field. At that point, lots of people who had planned on going to AA/CRNA school would probably back out and do something else, but for now, those people who don't want to go "above and beyond" are fine. And in the event that the anesthesia job market gets just as saturated as pharmacy's, many of them might say the same thing as me -- why dive head-first into a disaster when there are all these other health professions they can pursue that have a significantly better outlook?
I'm not a fortune teller. I went the physician route because everything else had poor long-term prospects imo
