What are my chances as a PharmD student?

[keimeko]

Hello I am a 22 YO 3rd year Doctor Of pharmacy student planning on applying to vet med this cycle. I am also a first gen Asian American. Why did I do PharmD and want to do vet med after? Well I am from an Asian family and traditional asians unfortunately do not like animals and view them as kind of inferior. As a result, I was forced to do pharmacy. I extremely do not like it and want to pursue something I have always wanted to do rather than living my parents life.

My all “undergrad”/vet prereq gpa would be a 3.99
However… I struggled to find motivation in pharmacy so I will be ending my PharmD gpa with a 3.0 at UF
I do not have a bachelor’s degree. I jumped immediately into pharmacy school after high school as I got an associates during high school. I have already completed the prerequisites for vet with that too.
All of these hours below are our required clinical experiences >
I have 1000 hours as a CVS pharmacist intern.
160 hours as a Walgreens pharmacy intern
160 hours at Bethesda Hospital pharmacy intern
240 hours (pending for Abroad clinical in Japan)
240 hours Medication Therapy management intern
720 hours Emergency medicine/pharmacy intern
240 hours Publix Pharmacy intern
240 hours Veterans Affair Infectious disease intern

Our pharmacy program requires us to work 40 hours a week for our internship. It is very hard to find animal clinics that will be open after my classes/ internships that are required so unfortunately I will only have around 100 hours as a veterinary assistant.

I am interested in avian medicine as I have raised birds my whole life. Currently I also have 4 parrots. I’ve seen so much abuse and small dirty caging in the avian community. That is the primary reason why I want to be an avian vet. Aside from that I also have a small business of stickers and stationary raising awareness to native birds. I have spent a lot of time building my business throughout the years. Aside from all the medical activities, I am a part time artist.

For other community volunteer work, I also paint a lot of murals for children’s gardens, worked with a team to paint a whole intersection commissioned by the mayor, helped paint low income housing, etc. I also paint portraits for donors who donate to animal cruelty organizations as volunteer work.

I also do dog training with my Aussie. He is currently GCC, CGCC, novice and intermediate trick tittles. He will be competing in his first novice rally title next month. I take dog training very seriously and I am not sure how to include it into my animal hours.

My spouse is in the military so wherever he moves I will get instate tuition.
I will apply at my home state UF, but aiming to move to go to Colorado State. 3 other colleges I am interested in is Washington state, Minnesota, and Oregon State.
I know I need more hours for animal experience with a veterinary, but unfortunately with my PHARMD where I am required to work 40 hours as an intern every week, the vet clinics close on weekends and end at 5 pm here.
What would my chances be?

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[renacuaja]

Of schools that publish minimums -- 400 seems to be the most common minimum. There are some outlier cases where students have gotten in with fewer but I wouldn't count on it.

I am interested in avian medicine as I have raised birds my whole life. Currently I also have 4 parrots. I’ve seen so much abuse and small dirty caging in the avian community. That is the primary reason why I want to be an avian vet.

As an avian veterinarian you wouldn't be directly working to counteract pet abuse or neglect. If that is your absolute goal, maybe look into bird rescues?

More often, it will just be negligent well-meaning (after all they made a specialist vet visit) owners that need husbandry guidance. they don't usually follow husbandry guidance but it's not like you could take their bird from them.

 

[RightMeow!]

I applaud you for wanting to pursue a career that you enjoy rather than one you felt forced into. However, I would be cautious applying to vet school with such little experience as it may not be what you think it is. If your primary interest is avian husbandry, there are other careers/opportunities that will be more fulfilling for you, require less time investment, and don't come with a huge financial burden.

Some things to consider:

Why do you not enjoy pharm and is it something that you would have to deal with in vet med anyway? Are you willing to sacrifice a $100k+/year job to sit in school for another 4 years, spend another $200k-400k in tuition, and then make the same amount or even less money as a veterinarian? If you want to specialize in avian medicine, are you willing to spend an additional 1 - 4 years (if you're lucky) doing internships and residencies that involve 80+ hour work weeks and a shockingly low salary? Even then, aside from diagnosing/prescribing/cutting you probably won't be directly working with the birds. If you don't get into an avian-only practice, are you willing to work with other species? Sure you get to examine cute kittens, but you also have to euthanize the parvo puppy in the next room because the owner's can't afford treatment. If you go the mixed animal route, are you willing to be on call for nights and weekends?

I would recommend getting more exposure to veterinary medicine as a whole to ensure it's something you want to do before you make such a huge commitment. If it's hard with your current weekday obligations, you could volunteer at shelters over the weekend. You could shadow at an ER after you get off work for a few hours. Maybe you could even find a local aviary and see if you can shadow their veterinarian during a day off.

As for the remainder of your application, it might be difficult to get an acceptance with your pharm GPA. I do feel that WSU is one of the more holistic schools. However, while a 3.0 GPA isn't inherently a red flag, the fact that it's recent and from another science based graduate program could be concerning.

 

[battie]

Am alternative to going to vet school would be working in veterinary research using your pharmd.

Regardless, I do not recommend applying to vet school this year

 

[keimeko]

I applaud you for wanting to pursue a career that you enjoy rather than one you felt forced into. However, I would be cautious applying to vet school with such little experience as it may not be what you think it is. If your primary interest is avian husbandry, there are other careers/opportunities that will be more fulfilling for you, require less time investment, and don't come with a huge financial burden.

Some things to consider:

Why do you not enjoy pharm and is it something that you would have to deal with in vet med anyway? Are you willing to sacrifice a $100k+/year job to sit in school for another 4 years, spend another $200k-400k in tuition, and then make the same amount or even less money as a veterinarian? If you want to specialize in avian medicine, are you willing to spend an additional 1 - 4 years (if you're lucky) doing internships and residencies that involve 80+ hour work weeks and a shockingly low salary? Even then, aside from diagnosing/prescribing/cutting you probably won't be directly working with the birds. If you don't get into an avian-only practice, are you willing to work with other species? Sure you get to examine cute kittens, but you also have to euthanize the parvo puppy in the next room because the owner's can't afford treatment. If you go the mixed animal route, are you willing to be on call for nights and weekends?

I would recommend getting more exposure to veterinary medicine as a whole to ensure it's something you want to do before you make such a huge commitment. If it's hard with your current weekday obligations, you could volunteer at shelters over the weekend. You could shadow at an ER after you get off work for a few hours. Maybe you could even find a local aviary and see if you can shadow their veterinarian during a day off.

As for the remainder of your application, it might be difficult to get an acceptance with your pharm GPA. I do feel that WSU is one of the more holistic schools. However, while a 3.0 GPA isn't inherently a red flag, the fact that it's recent and from another science based graduate program could be concerning.

Currently I volunteer at a low cost animal clinic where our clientele is mostly of the homeless population. I’ve always done outreach to rural areas. I’ve witnessed vets put down dogs due to extremely negligence as the owners simply couldn’t take care of the dogs or even themselves.
I also don’t mind being on call or night since I have done that before many times in pharmacy when I worked in the Cardio/neuro department
I understand the costs but I’m graduating with only 60k in debt for pharmacy school due to some scholarships and will be utilizing VA loans for the rest of vet school. I am only 22 and will be graduating at 23 so I was thinking I will still be in the same age group as other applicant.
Unfortunately I am currently in a small town so there are no aviaries. Avian medicine is more like wishful thinking but I do not mind working with small animal either as that’s what I’m currently used to . 🙁 however thank you for the recommendation about shelter weekends! I will definitely be looking into that!

 

[keimeko]

Am alternative to going to vet school would be working in veterinary research using your pharmd.

Regardless, I do not recommend applying to vet school this year

Unfortunately there is only 4 veterinary pharmacy residencies throughout all of America.

 

[keimeko]

I applaud you for wanting to pursue a career that you enjoy rather than one you felt forced into. However, I would be cautious applying to vet school with such little experience as it may not be what you think it is. If your primary interest is avian husbandry, there are other careers/opportunities that will be more fulfilling for you, require less time investment, and don't come with a huge financial burden.

Some things to consider:

Why do you not enjoy pharm and is it something that you would have to deal with in vet med anyway? Are you willing to sacrifice a $100k+/year job to sit in school for another 4 years, spend another $200k-400k in tuition, and then make the same amount or even less money as a veterinarian? If you want to specialize in avian medicine, are you willing to spend an additional 1 - 4 years (if you're lucky) doing internships and residencies that involve 80+ hour work weeks and a shockingly low salary? Even then, aside from diagnosing/prescribing/cutting you probably won't be directly working with the birds. If you don't get into an avian-only practice, are you willing to work with other species? Sure you get to examine cute kittens, but you also have to euthanize the parvo puppy in the next room because the owner's can't afford treatment. If you go the mixed animal route, are you willing to be on call for nights and weekends?

I would recommend getting more exposure to veterinary medicine as a whole to ensure it's something you want to do before you make such a huge commitment. If it's hard with your current weekday obligations, you could volunteer at shelters over the weekend. You could shadow at an ER after you get off work for a few hours. Maybe you could even find a local aviary and see if you can shadow their veterinarian during a day off.

As for the remainder of your application, it might be difficult to get an acceptance with your pharm GPA. I do feel that WSU is one of the more holistic schools. However, while a 3.0 GPA isn't inherently a red flag, the fact that it's recent and from another science based graduate program could be concerning.

Another note during my years of pharmacy on why my gpa only a 3.0 while my undergrad was a 3.99… my father’s epilepsy worsened. I am the only English speaking person of my family so I had to leave school sometimes to drive 7 hours back home to help my father. I am the only child too. My father then crashed his car from an epilepsy attack, thank god it was only a tree. A few months later, during one of the exams, my father had gotten another seizure and crashed MY car back at home. I had to find a way home to get all the paperwork done and try to get whatever money I could scrap back. To make it worse, he hit a cop car so he was taken to court so I had to be there. It was a medical emergency so it was fine regardless but I had to miss a lot of school for this. Another incident is one of my parrots passed away through a tragic accident so I could not focus on that exam either, actually spent the exam trying to not break into tears. Then another incident happened my fiancée’s grandmother passed away so I had to go up to Michigan for a week for the funeral. Then I found out there has been an abuse case in my family between my grandparents for over 40 years. I had to go back down there AGAIN to separate them because my grandpa’s dementia worsened and he has been beating my grandmother for 40 years (long story short) Throughout the arguing and trying to separate them, I found out my father was adopted and they were not even my biological grandparents. Broke me for almost a year. Then my great grandmother passed away so I had to go back home. It was just death after death after death. Incident after incident. I don’t know how I managed to pass all my classes, but unfortunately I had to get a lot of Cs because of that. I don’t know if I should write this on the hardships of the essay area as these incidents truly killed me inside.

 

[JaynaAli]

I think that, especially as someone who would be leaving one professional program for another, you need to focus on getting lots more veterinary experience before even thinking about applying. I realize it can be hard to find hours while staying in pharmacy school, but someone on an admissions committee is gonna want to know you absolutely know what this field entails and feel confident that you’re gonna stick it out this time. And I am not saying that being a career changer is a negative, but you need to be sure vet med is right for you. If you’re gonna put on your app you want to be an avian vet, you absolutely need to have shadowed a veterinarian who sees exotics. Reality may be extremely different than you imagine. Or maybe not, but you won’t know until you shadow. You also need lots more hours in small animal or other aspects of vet med in case you don’t pursue an exotics career. But 100 hours is drops in a bucket compared to most veterinary applicants. It’s very common for vet applicants to have 1000+ hours in a wide variety of experiences. I’m not saying you need thousands, but you need more and you need to demonstrate that you know what you’re getting in to (as best as a pre-vet can) and that you’re not gonna change your mind again down the line.

 

[keimeko]

I think that, especially as someone who would be leaving one professional program for another, you need to focus on getting lots more veterinary experience before even thinking about applying. I realize it can be hard to find hours while staying in pharmacy school, but someone on an admissions committee is gonna want to know you absolutely know what this field entails and feel confident that you’re gonna stick it out this time. And I am not saying that being a career changer is a negative, but you need to be sure vet med is right for you. If you’re gonna put on your app you want to be an avian vet, you absolutely need to have shadowed a veterinarian who sees exotics. Reality may be extremely different than you imagine. Or maybe not, but you won’t know until you shadow. You also need lots more hours in small animal or other aspects of vet med in case you don’t pursue an exotics career. But 100 hours is drops in a bucket compared to most veterinary applicants. It’s very common for vet applicants to have 1000+ hours in a wide variety of experiences. I’m not saying you need thousands, but you need more and you need to demonstrate that you know what you’re getting in to (as best as a pre-vet can) and that you’re not gonna change your mind again down the line.

I will have around 2k hours in drug therapy management in various fields mainly cardiology, neurology, and infectious diseases. Just probably 100 vet med hours. I saw someone recommend shelter hours on the weekend so I’ll look into that. Unfortunately where I live there is not any exotic places I can volunteer at. For example, the closest zoo is 1-2 hours away too.
As a result, do you think I should not spin my essay off of avian med since I only will have experience in underprivileged small animal? Where I volunteer at its low cost/ no cost vet clinic so our clients are usually homeless.

 

[supershorty]

I will have around 2k hours in drug therapy management in various fields mainly cardiology, neurology, and infectious diseases. Just probably 100 vet med hours. I saw someone recommend shelter hours on the weekend so I’ll look into that. Unfortunately where I live there is not any exotic places I can volunteer at. For example, the closest zoo is 1-2 hours away too.
As a result, do you think I should not spin my essay off of avian med since I only will have experience in underprivileged small animal? Where I volunteer at its low cost/ no cost vet clinic so our clients are usually homeless.

I'm going to be blunt - I don't think you should apply with only 100 hours, period. As Jayna said, right now, it raises concerns that you don't have a full understanding of what being a veterinarian entails - that paired with not finishing a different graduate level program* makes you a very weak candidate because if you don't have a good understanding of the field, and you have a demonstrated challenge with committing and seeing something through, what's to say you won't do the same thing with veterinary medicine once you experience more of it?

Don't apply this year. You need to spend more time in the field and get many more veterinary hours to see if that's even really what you want to do.

*Edited because it's unclear to me whether you're intending to finish your PharmD or not.

 

[battie]

Unfortunately there is only 4 veterinary pharmacy residencies throughout all of America.

Doesn't necessarily need to be veterinary pharmacy residency or specialty for a PharmD. However, we do need more folks doing those residencies; I very commonly have to correct non-educated pharmacists when they call me to change the drug or dose that I'm trying to prescribe.

When I said research, I meant drug research. There are many companies currently releasing what could be game changing drugs such as the Elanco parvo monoclonal antibody or the panoquell from earlier last year. I know my job would be harder without cerenia. All of those are animal exclusive drugs, with two of them developed specifically for animals.

 

[keimeko]

I'm going to be blunt - I don't think you should apply with only 100 hours, period. As Jayna said, right now, it raises concerns that you don't have a full understanding of what being a veterinarian entails - that paired with not finishing a different graduate level program* makes you a very weak candidate because if you don't have a good understanding of the field, and you have a demonstrated challenge with committing and seeing something through, what's to say you won't do the same thing with veterinary medicine once you experience more of it?

Don't apply this year. You need to spend more time in the field and get many more veterinary hours to see if that's even really what you want to do.

*Edited because it's unclear to me whether you're intending to finish your PharmD or not.

I am graduating with my PharmD! I’m not dropping out! I’m almost done and have scarified so much for this program just to make my parents happy at the sake of myself. I have passed all of my classes and am about to start my advanced pharmacy rotations and will be graduating next summer. When I said I didn’t do well I meant there were many exams I scored Cs on due to familial stress so that’s why a lot of my courses had Cs on them. But I never failed a pharmacy course.
I’ll be signing up to volunteer at shelters more now since they are open during the weekends. It is just so hard to find time to get experience when our pharmacy hours end at the same time clinics close. Hopefully I’ll be able to get more hours from this. I think I’m only going to apply to one then if I don’t get in I guess that’s that for that year.

 

[supershorty]

I’ll be signing up to volunteer at shelters more now since they are open during the weekends

Be careful with this - unless you're working under the supervision of a veterinarian, these are animal experience hours, but not necessarily veterinary hours.

There's no rush. Why not take the time to really explore the field and then apply when you are a better applicant and know for sure that it's actually what you want to do?

 

[keimeko]

Be careful with this - unless you're working under the supervision of a veterinarian, these are animal experience hours, but not necessarily veterinary hours.

There's no rush. Why not take the time to really explore the field and then apply when you are a better applicant and know for sure that it's actually what you want to do?

I have another question. As I live in really small town, our nearest sanctuaries or wildlife rescues are 1-2 hours away. It is a very small town with a very underprivileged community and that is why I volunteer at the local charity clinic. As a result it is really hard to find places to volunteer aside from the county’s humane society which is the shelter. What would you suggest to do when my area does not have a lot of volunteering opportunities with a veterinarian?

 

[battie]

What would you suggest to do when my area does not have a lot of volunteering opportunities with a veterinarian?

Some of this will need to wait until after you graduate and have the time to commit to getting the hours you need. Once you have an "adult" schedule, you can dedicate x hours per week to everything

 

[JaynaAli]

What would you suggest to do when my area does not have a lot of volunteering opportunities with a veterinarian?

If you do not have additional veterinary experience, you will almost certainly not be accepted. If all your experience is charitable working with care for pets of homeless people, that’s very admirable but it’s going to be VASTLY different than traditional for-profit general or specialty practice. If opportunities really not available in your area and you truly want to pursue vet med, you may have to drive or move. But I am skeptical that a place large enough to have a pharmacy school and with resources to have a clinic catering to pets of people who are homeless is a true ‘veterinary desert’, for lack of a better term? I’m from rural middle of nowhere so I understand not having the resources found in a large city but even here in nowheresville there are opportunities.

You find to a place that does have opportunities and maybe consider the possibility that you do have to drive an hour or two for an experience. When I was a pre-vet I would work 3-4 days a week in a pathology lab at my college and then I’d drive 2.5h home and work for a GP vet 2-3 days of the week. Ask vets in your area if you can shadow for a day. If that goes well, ask if you can come back again. In some states that don’t require licensing of support staff, ERs and Banfield clinics often have a fair amount of turnover and may be willing to train someone for an assistant role. But you need to find something and until you do, I don’t think it’s worth the time and money to apply for veterinary school. You can get there, but I don’t think you’re ready now.


(Edit: I looked at your post again and realized you mentioned being at UF for your PharmD. I lived in Gainesville for three years and there are tons of clinics around that area, including at least two or three ER/Specialty hospitals, local chains of clinics with multiple locations like The Pet Hospitals, and lots of other private practices as well as corporate practices like Banfield. There may be more competition for shadowing or paid position because other pre-vets are in the area, but there are absolutely opportunities for vet med in Gainesville Florida. There’s also probably above average opportunities for things like equine med with Ocala being so close, though equine can be a tough field to break into if you weren’t born a horse person.

Also if you’re referring to Gainesville in your posts about a small town, I would like to say that I am from a town of 800 people and live in a nearly town with a whopping 12,000 people. Gainesville felt like a huge city to me with its population of like 150k, lol.)