UBuffalo or URI Pharmacy?

Neonzeus
Sun, 07 Apr 2013 18:30:33 +0000

I can only give you my opinion, as the parent of a UB Pharmacy student. I am assuming that you would be entering the School of Pharmacy, vs. being a prepharm student.

(1) Calculate the cost to graduate. You don’t want to owe a ton of money, and the cost when you’re paying grad-school tuition prices is very high. (2) When we visited U-RI many years ago, their facilities did not compare well. The labs and class offerings didn’t compare favorably at all to UB. UB now has a brand new School of Pharmacy. I don’t know if U-RI has updated its facilities. (3) UB is again tied at #17 for US News top pharmacy schools, and U-RI is ranked at #43 if rankings matter to you. (4) My son felt that UB offered a large-university experience, which he wanted. This is a “fit” issue. (5) UB clearly has a strong presence in Western NY. Students serve on regional professional committees, participate in competitions and have clinical rotations through the hospitals, clinics and retail establishments in Western NY. If your focus is on New England, you might prefer to stay in R.I. to take advantage of New England networking opportunities. (6) the weather in Buffalo is…bad. It’s cold, snowy and windy. The campus sure isn’t as pretty as U-RI. IMO, it’s depressing. The new School of Pharmacy is on South Campus not on North Campus. (The med, dental and pharmacy book store is by South Campus.)

Consider the cost of traveling for vacations and holidays, keeping an apartment over the summer, etc.

If you’re prepharm, I’d have a different set of considerations. For example, very few prepharm students actually make it into pharmacy programs thanks to weed-out classes like organic chemistry or calculus. Ask if these classes are graded on a curve at the schools you’re considering (they are curved at UB). If you’re taking calculus with all of the pre-med, pre-pharm and engineering students and the class is graded on a curve, the odds of getting great grades can obviously be reduced. I therefore suggest that prepharm students evaluate possible fall-back majors when picking a school, so they have a Plan B if pharmacy doesn’t turn out to be for them. I also suggest comparing the prepharm prereqs. If a student has to take the PCAT and apply to several other schools to increase the chances of being admitted somewhere, meeting prereqs is a big deal. If semesters have a lot of stacked tough classes, it might not be a good idea to try to take electives that will help satisfy the prereqs of other programs. Weigh the prereqs for both graduation and for prepharm, and look at how the classes are scheduled.

In addition to comparing prereqs, I’d also suggest reviewing the academic requirements of the pharmacy programs themselves. For example, what is the required GPA to stay in the program? What are the academic rules for probation, and for advancing to the next year of classes? How many of the entering P1 students graduate with their class? What are their licensing pass-rates? I’d obviously suggest choosing the school with the best statistics for graduating successful students.

At the end of the day, one school will stand out for you based on cost, location, academics and fit (where you feel comfortable). It might be either U-RI or Suny-Buffalo.