Hello! I am currently applying to college and I wanted to ask how should I do my pathway way for college. As of right now I have 2 options that I have came up with. The 1st option is that I would go to college to immediately do my Pharmacy Prerequisites so I could go to pharmacy school to get my pharmD and then go back to college to complete my medical school prerequisites so I can apply and go to medical school. for the 2nd option, I can go to college for 4 years to do both my medical and pharmacy prerequisites and as well get both medical and pharmacy opportunities. Then, I would go to pharmacy school first and get my pharmD and finally apply and go to medical school. Those are both of my options that I came up with but I am not sure which one is the better one so if you guy could give me your opinions I would really appreciate it.
Do you think you want to be a doctor or a pharmacist? Your paths are very convoluted and will cost you a fortune.
Pick one. Doing both isn’t a good idea.
Both pathways you list above are terrible ideas. It will take you a couple of decades and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do both.
Do you want to be a physician or a pharmacist? Pick one or the other.
Is it possible to do both?
Yes, it is, but what is your purpose in doing both? This is the crucial question and one you need to answer (for yourself–you don’t need to explain to us on the internet) before you decide to proceed farther along the very long and very expensive path you’re talking about.
If you’re interested in drug development, neither a PharmD nor a MD are the optimal pathways. (Optimal would be a PhD or MD/PhD.)
If you absolutely, positively MUST do both, you have to earn your PharmD first, then go back and pick up you’re pre-reqs for med school and try for a admission to a MD or DO program.
Why?
Because becoming a working physician requires more than just earning your MD/DO. You must also complete 3 to 11 years of additional training (residency). Without completing a residency, you won’t be able to get a medical license. A completed residency is a hard requirement. No leeway. If you want to examine and treat patients, you must have completed a medical residency in the US.
A PharmD doesn’t require additional training after finishing your degree to work as licensed pharmacist so it’s easier to do that first.
If you finish med school, then go back to finish pharmacy pre-reqs and go to pharmacy school, you’ll have too big of gap (3-5 years at least) between the end of med school and the beginning of residency training. No residency programs director will accept you into their program because of the multi-year gap. Any time spent away from actually working with patients leads to a loss of clinical skills and a loss of medical knowledge. (People forget stuff they don’t use.) Plus if your aren’t working in medicine, you aren’t keeping up with all the new information and best practices coming out. (Did you know that doctors have to earn X number of Continuing Medical Education credits every year to keep their board certification and their medical licenses? Being a physician means you’re going to class in some form for the rest of your life.)
If you stick with medicine through med school, through residency and potentially through fellowship training, you will invested 7-15 years of your life post college into becoming a MD/DO. Realistically are you going to just quit that and start as student all over again to get your PharmD? It’s tough–and it gets tougher as your get older (you’ll be into your 30s by the time you finished residency)– to go from being the boss, the top of the pyramid, to being the bottom person doing everyone’s else’s scut work. Keep that in mind.
So Pharm school, then med school. But even that pathway is risky and will probably take you longer than you think.
Why?
Because med schools don’t like to “poach” students away from other needed healthcare professions.
Med schools expect those leaving one healthcare profession for another to have actually worked in their field for several years so that they understand the potential and the limitations of their chosen career. Med school adcomms will expect a healthcare career changer to have an articulate and deeply thoughtful explanation of why they want to quit what they’re doing to become a physician.
Without that explanation, you won’t even get considered for a med school admission.
As for doing both pre-pharm and pre-med at the same time and getting your ECS done for both…..don’t even think about it.
While you might be able to get all the pre-reqs done in 4-5 years, you won’t be able to get the ECs done, especially for med school. As med school has become more and more competitive, the expectations for ECs have gotten higher and higher. Hundred of hours of community service with disadvantaged communities. Hundred of hours in patient contact volunteering or employment. Shadowing. Leadership. Research exposure. It’s a lot and most students cannot manage to get it all done AND keep a GPA high enough to be considered a competitive applicant and score high on the MCAT. (Most students take 3 months of dedicated, full time studying to prepare for the MCAT.)
One more consideration, adcomms at every med school and at every pharmacy school you apply to will be able to see that you’ve prepared for both. No professional program ever wants to be someone’s second choice or back-up. Pharm schools will say: this guy looks like he wants to be a doctor. Let him go to med school. Med schools will say: why is the pre-pharm guy applying to our program. Let him go to pharmacy school.
Try to double time it and you’ll end up rejected everywhere.
Aren’t premed requirements a superset of prepharm requirements?
We saw examples of this, but involving premed courses and pre-vet courses and pre-vet experience and research experience.
As far as I know the premed course requirements are the same as pre-vet course requirements, and both are close to a superset of both what you need for pre-pharmacy and pre-biology-research courses. There might be a bit more chemistry for a pre-pharmacy student, but there is quite a bit of chemistry for a premed student also. Thus in terms of coursework I expect that you probably could complete the required courses for a premed student and complete the required courses for a pre-pharmacy student. It might be a lot, but is probably possible.
The problem that I see would be with your “other experience”.
One daughter was pre-vet. She took the same courses as a premed students because pre-vet and premed courses are the same. Most of her friends were premed students because she kept seeing them over and over again in the same courses. However, the clinical experience that she got outside of class was perhaps similar in the sense that she was seeing patients in a “medical” environment, but was also completely different in that the patients that my daughter was seeing were all animals (probably dogs and cows were most common, but there was a range of other types of animals as well). Thus while her premed friends were in a human hospital helping with human patients, my daughter was holding dogs or reaching inside cows for a variety of reasons (helping birthing is obvious, however apparently cows can’t swallow pills so putting medicine inside the cow is another example).
My other daughter was a biology major, and at first was not quite sure what to do with it. Again her courses overlapped a lot with premed requirements and she knew a lot of premed students. She very quickly realized that treating human patients (whether as a nurse or as a doctor) was not what she wanted to do. Thus while she was acing the tough premed classes that wasn’t going to do her any good because medical school was not for her. However, due to a change in majors she needed to take four lab courses at once sophomore year, and discovered that she loves lab work and is good at it. She got involved in research, and then cancer research. While her premed friends were in a hospital for hours and hours getting relevant medical experience, my daughter was in a lab for hours and hours growing human cancer cells and then seeing what some specific medications would do to the cancer cells. She got familiar with and very good at a variety of lab techniques. Then after graduation she got a research job using the same lab techniques that she was already very familiar with. At one point she was working with biochemists in the sense that the biochemists were trying to develop synthetic chemicals that would inhibit a particular hormone then my daughter would run lab tests to see what the chemicals would do to actual human cells and actual human hormones (but no human patients at the early stage they were at). Then she applied for PhD programs using the experience that she had gotten both while in university and on the job after getting her bachelor’s degree.
Since both daughters had a huge amount of very relevant experience that applied to what they wanted to do next, this helped quite a bit both in terms of getting references and in terms of convincing employers and then graduate programs that they actually did want to do whatever they were applying to. There was no confusion “do you want to do medical school or pharmacy school or a DVM or a PhD”. Their experience pointed clearly to what they wanted to do next and was consistent with what they said in their personal statements and what they were applying for.
There is another issue here however. At the point that a student is applying to universities, in many cases they might not know what career they want to end up with. If they know that they want to do something related to biology and chemistry, they can start taking relevant classes. University will expose them to some options. They while part way through getting a bachelor’s degree a student can begin to narrow down what it is they are going to do with the knowledge that they are gaining in their studies.
I think that being ambiguous regarding your path is okay for a year of two. Eventually you need to pick one and be clear which one you prefer.
Even for students who start university knowing that they want to aim for medical school, the large majority end up doing something else. There are lots and lots of examples of “something else” that are possible.