PharmD or MD or PA

juillet
Sat, 23 Dec 2017 03:59:47 +0000

You cannot “pursue med school on the side.” Of anything. Medical school is an intensive, full-time process; med students don’t really have time to work at all, let alone work work in a professional career like a pharmacist or physicians assistant. Also, your plan doesn’t really make sense in the context of avoiding debt. Pharmacy school is about the same length of time and costs around the same as medical school (check out [USC’s cost of attendance](https://pharmacyschool.usc.edu/programs/pharmd/pharmdprogram/cost/) here, or Washington State University’s [here](https://www.pharmacy.wsu.edu/prospectivestudents/)).

However, pharmacists have lower average salaries than physicians ($121,000 a year vs. $187,000 a year); I’d also be willing to bet that there’s a much wider range of medical salaries (Medscape reports that their primary care practitioners average $217K and their specialists $319K, and some specialists in areas like dermatology, cardiology, and orthopedics reported making $350-450K or more).

So pharmacy will not save you from big debt. Being a PA will put you in considerably less, as the program is only two years and they tend to be cheaper than MDs and PharmDs. But you do need to get 2-3 years of healthcare experience - and by experience, you have to have been working in a direct patient care role, like a nurse, paramedic, or CNA. CNA is probably the easiest route to go (I think the training is like a semester) but the pay is very low. Becoming a nurse after college would take you an additional 1-1.5 years in an accelerated program, assuming you have the right prerequisites, but that would have the highest pay while you work for 2-3 years, and then you could do either a PA or an NP program.

You will have to choose which of these three options you want. (Of course, you could always do them sequentially if you really wanted to, but that will be massive debt.)