Then you don't want to be an inpatient pharmacist that bad (you just kind of want it). Despite policy changes at your internship, nothing is guaranteed unless its in writing. You still have a chance to get what you want, you just need to grind and earn that chance with longevity and not expect short-term results. That means working at a BFE retail site to earn experience. Do not start drinking the common cup that once you do retail you're automatically at a 0% chance of getting a hospital job. You're only at 0% when you refuse to work in any setting for the longevity of time
No it wouldn't. He "worked" to gain experience and collected a check while looking for an opportunity that might come his way. Once he found one, he transitioned out and took the opportunity. We all have undesired corners when it comes to work and location. The goal is to earn your way out of it with time and experience.
This is the definition of the "American Dream." Job in a tolerable city with decent pay to reach satisfaction. Again though, you had to of known the situation of pharmacy back in 2016 and that the majority is in retail positions and that chances are, you'd have to start out in BFE retail. You rolled the dice and didn't get the drop you needed. Yet its still not too late but you have decided to move along and not give it a chance.
Despite all of this and not wanting to tear you down (truthfully), I do highly suggest you take the first offer in retail just for the sake of the following:
1) Relieve your student debt. Without this, you'll have little money to really do anything even in a city.
2) Build up a savings account. Emergencies happen and you don't want to be down the same rabbit hole if something happens during your CS goals.
However, if you wont act before even starting in pharmacy, you might as well pursue the career change now and ignore any opportunity cost. I do wish you luck & hope this decision is indeed the best one for you. Who knows, you might not like working in a hospital as a pharmacist to begin with and this is your ticket to pivot out of the scene altogether.
First of all, I don't think your analogy that compares the career trajectory of the PA I know to that of some pharmacists' is really accurate. First of all, orthopedic surgery PA jobs are actually considered to be highly desirable to many PAs (largely because of the $$$), and it's not considered to be a universally undesirable "stepping stone" job that new graduate PAs take because they realize they have to pay their dues in order to get a "better" job. He (and the vast majority of PAs who take jobs in orthopedic surgery) applied for the job because he was interested in orthopedic surgery and wanted to make lots of money. After he became burned out from the intense schedule, he decided to apply for a job as an ER PA that offered similar pay to his orthopedic surgery job but for a much more humane schedule.
In other words, he didn't apply for the orthopedic surgery job because he realized he needed to start at the bottom, and at the same time, transitioning from his orthopedic surgery job to his ER job wasn't a vertical (I.e., upwards trajectory) move - most PAs would consider it to be a lateral move. In fact, I know another guy from undergrad who graduated a few years ago from South U's PA program in Savannah, GA who took an ER position as his first PA job out of school.
Basically, the point I'm trying to make is that those guys chose to apply to the jobs they applied to upon graduation because they had specific preferences in mind regarding the kind of medicine they wanted to practice and where they wanted to work. From what they've told me, if a PA is flexible regarding location, they can get a job in pretty much any specialty. The only exception might be dermatology, which they tell me has gotten very competitive in recent years.
I think a more accurate analogy would be to compare the situation of a PA who graduates into a saturated job market and has no options aside from working for a high volume pediatrics practice that involves seeing 30+ patients per day, getting practically no breaks during the day, having to take call and/or stay late multiple nights per week, and earning a significantly below-average salary (pediatrics PAs actually do earn the lowest salaries of all PAs on average). After "getting over themselves" and grinding through that miserable job for a few years, they leverage that experience to apply for a relatively cushy dermatology PA job that receives 50+ applications, pays 2x the money and a better benefits package, and doesn't require them to take any call.
Anyways, I know you said that it's not necessarily true that working as a retail pharmacist always makes someone unhireable for hospital positions, but I can tell you that at the hospitals in my area, it does. This is coming directly from the DOP of the hospital system I used to work for as well as from pharmacists who work at the other hospital in town.
There's a pharmacist who has worked inpatient at one of the local hospitals for several decades, and her husband has both outpatient hospital pharmacy experience as well as experience working for Walgreens, and even he can't get a basic staffing position despite being married to one of hospital's veteran inpatient pharmacists.
The scary thing about this is that I don't live in what most people would call a desirable area, so if the hospitals in my crappy city consider retail pharmacists to be branded by the "scarlet letter," then how far into BFE would you actually have to go to find a hospital that *would* be willing to hire a pharmacist with only retail experience?
BTW, I'm surprised that people consider my mentality of potentially wanting to transition into CS to sound entitled because I look at it like this: there are numerous risks associated with completing a CS bootcamp program, such as the very real possibility of failing out, simply not liking coding as a full-time endeavor, not being able to keep up with the pace of the course, etc. So if anything, I'd expect people to have a reaction more along the lines of, "If you're unhappy with your prospects in pharmacy and are willing to assume the risks associated with doing a bootcamp program, then just know that you're not guaranteed an ideal outcome with CS either." Or something like that. (There's probably a better way to word it, but it's just not coming to me right now.)
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