Life Off-Label

You know who they are. They’re why your two-hour road trip feels like eight. They’re why you don’t watch sports with certain friends. They’re the buzzkills of life. They’re everywhere, and the world of pharmacy isn’t immune to them.

But here’s the thing… the ones in pharmacy are the ones who have the least to complain about. Yes, I’m calling you out, you middle-aged doom and gloom party poopers. You only had to get a bachelors degree, you graduated with FAR less debt, and you still get to ride the six-figure salary train with the rest of us. When the PharmD was standardized, nobody said you had to go back to school. You got to enjoy the fruits of increased wages and bonuses during the shortage, and now that things have died down a bit you think things are heading for the worst.

I mean, do you know how many bachelor degrees pay six figures? Not many. Even if your job was heaving piles of cow manure into a fan that only splatters it back in your face, you should be happy because you’re making six figures with a friggin’ bachelors degree. You know what I was doing with my bachelors degree? Working as a pharmacy tech. Does that sounds pathetic to you? I have friends with bachelors degrees that have even worse jobs with worse pay. And in this economy, we’re all supposed to sit here and pat ourselves on the back for even having a job at all.

So, sorry if I can’t really empathize with all of your complaints. You sound like that spoiled kid in high school who thinks it’s weird that not everyone’s parents can buy them a car. You don’t really know how bad it is for others.

The younger generation of students and pharmacists are going through a minimum of six, but more often 8 or more years of school to get our PharmDs. Most of us will also graduate with a lot of student loan debt, many in the six-figure range, so even though we’ll be making the same good money as our elders, it won’t seem like as much when we’re putting away so much of our paychecks to pay our loans back. Yet we don’t seem to be complaining so much.

Maybe it’s because my generation has a different perspective. Pharmacy has its own issues, especially on the retail side of things, but no job is perfect. Personally, I’m glad I’ve worked those crappy grocery store jobs all those years in high school and undergrad, because it gave me such an appreciation for pharmacy. Many jobs have difficult customers, lazy coworkers, stressful situations, cranky bosses, etc. But how many do you get to be so important and get paid so well for doing it? Not many, but pharmacy is one of them.

Perhaps knowing the obstacles we face, we’re more willing to look to the different opportunities pharmacy has to offer. So what if a robot can dispense a few pills quicker than a human? When it comes to whose better at counseling, unless you have the personality of a leafblower, a pharmacist should win. We also know the power of social networking and technology, and we’re generally very good at both. Wherever one door closes, another might open where we could utilize our skills in those areas.

I get it though. I’m just a student. Even though I have a fair amount of experience under my belt, I’ve really just dipped my feet in pharmacy’s waters. I don’t know what it’s like to work the same job for 30 years and feel burned out. And maybe it doesn’t matter how good the job is anyway. Most people are just naturally prone to being cynical after a certain point of time. But I hope not, and I’m going to remain optimistic that I won’t become one of them.