PharmD or MD or PA

mohchan360
Thu, 21 Dec 2017 21:33:56 +0000

The process through pharmacy school is relatively similar to medical school. At the same time as pre-med students take the MCAT, you’d take the PCAT and use that to apply to pharmacy schools. PhamD programs are, like MD programs, 4 years in length. The first three years consist of core curriculum, and the last consists of rotations. However, pharmacy rotations are not exclusively clinical, a P4 pharmacy student could also be rotating in community pharmacies as well as industrial settings.

After graduating with a PharmD, you essentially have three career paths. You could obviously work in a community pharmacy such as CVS or Walgreen’s, but you could also decide to work in a hospital or industrial setting. Hospital pharmacy requires two separate, post-graduate year (PGY) residencies, which would each be a year in length. The PGY1 residency familiarizes the PharmD with working in a hospital setting, while the PGY2 residency allows the PharmD to specialize within a certain field of hospital pharmacy (oncology, pediatric, neurology, etc.) The pharmacy residency student-institution matching system parallels the NRMP for medical students. Industry pharmacy on the other hand often, but not always, requires post-graduate fellowships, which can be multiple years in length.

I guess the current job market for community pharmacists could be described as over-saturated, but the PharmD is such a versatile degree that it opens pathways into other pharmaceutical fields that may not be apparent to the general public.