Life Off-Label

A little while ago I, along with some other pharmacy students, volunteered in a mock interview session with pre-pharmacy students at the school. The pre-pharmacy students were also allowed to ask us some questions and bring up any concerns they had. Although we don’t serve on the admissions committee and  can’t definitively tell them “this will get you in” or “saying this will get you rejected”, we try to use our experience with interviewing for pharmacy school to help guide them in the right direction.

Some students have a lot of pharmacy experience before applying to pharmacy school. I worked almost two years full-time at a hospital, so I had a lot of specific things to draw on from that experience in my interview. One of the students, having had only shadowed a pharmacist a few times, asked me if it would be bad that most of her answers don’t involve pharmacy experience, and instead were drawn from her teaching experience. I told her that I don’t think it’s a bad thing as long as she could relate her answer to pharmacy. I have a lot of respect for teachers, and one thing they have that pharmacists need is the ability to communicate well with many people, especially when those people can be frustrating.

Before I worked as a pharmacy tech, I worked for years at a grocery store while I was in undergrad. Some of it was just as a cashier, and later I got promoted to working as a bookkeeper and in customer service. That didn’t teach me anything about drugs, but it did teach me that there are people in the world that can be difficult, and will resort to things like anger and personal insults just to get what they want. I learned how to deal with those situations, and I think I’ll be a better pharmacist for it.

I don’t want to discredit pharmacy experience when applying though. If I were on an admissions committee, I’d find it a huge red flag if someone had absolutely no pharmacy experience whatsoever. Pharmacy isn’t for everyone. Pharmacists don’t get the glory that doctors do. We have to put up with difficult people regardless of the field we work. The hours aren’t necessarily a comfy 8-5. Of course, there are many great things about being a pharmacist, but I think it’s important that people have at least dipped their feet in pharmacy so that they can see the downsides and really weight out the pros and cons. If they still say, “Hey, you know what, this is still worth it to me,” they should apply to pharmacy school. It’s a long four years and a lot of money to invest to change your mind.

But as far as experience for the sake of learning things like drug names, it’s good but not necessary. That’s what IPPE hours are for. I personally would rather have someone who is a little more well-rounded. People come to pharmacy school from a variety of backgrounds. Some came from different sectors of healthcare like nursing, others had more of a research background, and others came from completely unrelated fields like IT. I think each different experience can contribute different perspectives to the profession, and that kind of diversity will make us better as a whole. Experience is what you make of it.