What would be the best course of action?...

[blue pill]

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Hello,

First off, I'd like to apologize in advance for this necessarily long post. I do appreciate your time for reading through it, and especially for any input you may have.

I am a Canadian student having completed a 4-year undergraduate honors degree in biology this past April. As you may have guessed, I am interested in pursuing a career in pharmacy.

Assuming I calculated it correctly, my cumulative GPA (i.e. GPA for all courses completed at the university level) is 3.28. No, not stellar, but not horrible either. I expect this GPA to increase somewhat as I plan on completing some more courses this coming academic year for prereq purposes. Unless things go horribly wrong, I do expect it to break the 3.3 mark.

I've done a fair share of research into Canadian pharmacy schools (though I don't think I've done nearly enough). Assuming my coming year goes as planned, I believe I will be competitive for most Canadian programs.

While I would be glad to be accepted into any Canadian pharmacy school, I don't want to limit my options; or, perhaps put more bluntly, my odds. Let's face it: competition for pharmacy school is high, with plenty of well qualified candidates vying for the available seats. The odds work even more against my favour given my competitively 'average' GPA. I realize that even a 3.7 or higher GPA doesn't guarantee a spot, but it certainly doesn't help that there's plenty of competing candidates with those kinds of academic credentials and more.

Thus, in addition to all my [preferred] Canadian school applications, I am looking to apply to schools south of the border as well, which brings me to my question...

It's the end of the initial course registration period at my university, and due to reasons outside of my control, I could not begin registering for courses until two days ago. Furthering the problem is the fact that, given my rather recent 'practical' insight at the competitive outlook, I did not consider applying to US schools until very recently.

While there are still a few course registration periods that remain in the near future, the fact is that I have very little time to decide what would be the best course of action in terms of course selections. The idea is that I want to be able to apply to all Canadian pharmacy schools this coming year, as well as a handful of US ones. This is easier said than done, considering the drastically different prereq requirements between the average Canadian and US school. For example, economics and speech prereqs are common for American schools, neither of which I have completed.

While I could, in theory, simply sign up for both an economics and speech course for this coming year, it is a calculated risk. Why? Because I am, at the very least, already taking organic chemistry I & II prereqs, as well as a physical chemistry course (thermodynamics and the like) and English course. Considering I have never formally taken an economics-style course, I don't know if I would do well enough in it, even with maximum effort, to avoid the risk of lowering my GPA. Furthermore, I want to devote as much time as possible to the above mentioned prereqs, for obvious reasons.

Further complicating the matter are course equivalencies. Every school has a different equivalency chart. I would have to contact every US school I plan on applying to and ask them which economics (or other) course at my disposal they would consider equivalent to theirs'. What are the odds they will all agree? Surely, I can't realistically take more than one economics course and still expect to do well in all my other courses, et cetera?

And this is all assuming I already know which US schools I want to apply to. As it stands, I have absolutely no clue how to decide which schools I should apply to, aside from rankings found on the Internet, and word of mouth, which as always should be taken with a grain of salt.

And then there's the US system of 'semester hours'. As I understand it, a given course with X hours in a given week (tutorials and labs included) would equate to X semester hours. But again, I would have to double-check if this is the standard way of calculating semester hours with every school I plan on attending, which again brings me back to both the course equivalency problem, as well as the problem of knowing which US schools I should apply to in the first place.

So at the end of the day, I suppose what I am asking is this: what would you do if you were me?

Oh, and did I mention I will probably be writing the October PCAT as well?...

 

[UBCmicrobi]

Canadian student here.

It seems like a big risk to me to burden yourself with taking courses for American pre-reqs (not to mention the ordeal of applications and figuring out which US schools to apply to). If it were me, I'd focus on doing well on the courses you are planning on taking (organic chem etc) to improve your GPA for Canadian schools.

I totally understand wanting to improve your odds of being accepted to a pharmacy school (any pharmacy school), but to me it seems like you can have one or the other (ie Canadian or US) if you still have to complete pre-reqs. From what I gather, it is "easier" to get into US schools than Canadian schools, but you will almost certainly bring down your GPA doing the American pre-reqs, thus screwing your chances for a Canadian school. It would be a different story if you had already completed the US pre-reqs or they were the same as Canadian pre-reqs, then by all means apply to US schools. This is just my opinion though....

Can I ask which Canadian schools you are thinking about applying to? I would definitely suggest taking pharmacy program requirements (not pre-reqs, but courses that are required for pharmacy) such as microbiology, anatomy & physiology, statistics etc (and of course organic chem) if you haven't already since these courses will count towards your admissions average at some schools.

Good luck.

 

[blue pill]

You told me what I've been thinking... to focus on Canadian schools, at least for the coming year. No sense in throwing it all away just to have better odds for just one year, assuming I can even maintain or improve my GPA of course, which is unlikely.

Can I ask which Canadian schools you are thinking about applying to? I would definitely suggest taking pharmacy program requirements (not pre-reqs, but courses that are required for pharmacy) such as microbiology, anatomy & physiology, statistics etc (and of course organic chem) if you haven't already since these courses will count towards your admissions average at some schools.

At the top of my list are UWaterloo and UofT, simply because I'm from Ontario and they are the biggest number of seats available to me. Overall though, I would gladly go to UWaterloo, UofT, UBC, MUN, or DAL. Of particular note is UWaterloo, given the uniqueness of their program.

I exclude UofA because I don't think I would make their GPA cutoff, though I could be wrong. I have nothing against attending the school. The same goes for University of Manitoba, seeing as they have a history of dismissing all out-of-province applicants. The University of Saskatoon though I am a bit reluctant to apply to, due to its location.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by some courses "counting towards your admission average". As I understood it, all Canadian pharmacy schools consider every university-level course attempted in calculating your GPA, and may look at your prereq GPA separately in some circumstances. Could you please clarify what you mean?

 

[UBCmicrobi]

UBC, for example, does NOT use your overall GPA in calculating admissions average for the Faculty of Pharmacy. UBC looks at just the pharmacy pre-reqs (first year chem, bio, english etc) and any of the program requirements if they have already been competed (such as organic, microbi, statistics). So if you aced a bunch of spanish and psych courses, that unfortunately won't matter. Most of the other schools look at pre-reqs, but will also consider your upper years if the applicant has completed more than 1st year or has a degree. Every school varies, though and the details should be on the relevant faculty of pharm websites.

I'm glad to hear you are applying to pretty much all the Canadian schools, and not just the Ont. schools. If money is not an issue, I'd apply to U of A just for the hell of it, because the U of A application is really simple (just transcripts and a letter of intent; no letters of recommendation or interview are required). I agree about Manitoba though, if you aren't from Manitoba, don't bother! Definitely apply to Dal and MUN. I was offered interviews at these schools as an OOP student and got into MUN (and I was really impressed with the facilties at MUN).


Good luck again