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You don't need a graduate degree to work in pharmaceutical research. In fact, most the work is performed by BS-holding scientists, whereas the majority of PhDs are resigned to desk duties (project designing and administrative nonsense). Graduate school is not there just so you can "get a better job" at the end -- if anything, job prospects are better for those without the extra education.
"Pharmaceutical research" is also a big umbrella term, since lots of different fields are incorporated in the pipeline of drug discovery and development. You could be a clinician identifying interesting disease targets, a computer scientist modeling drug-enzyme interactions, an organic chemist synthesizing candidate compounds, or a structural biologist purifying proteins for crystallography. Lots of things to do.
And for what it's worth, the ACS certification isn't worth squat. You don't get any kind of certificate/acknowledgment, it's not printed on your transcript, and employers/grad school interviewers don't care. First and foremost in importance is the quality of your research, then classes/teaching/grades come secondary to that.
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