Well, people on the street, I am here to inform.
I am 3 weeks away from being done with my 5th total year of college. This is, however, only the end of the 3rd year in the actual Pharm.D. program. My first two years was strictly undergrad/prerequisites. So I know I confuse a lot of people when I talk about my "4th year rotations" regarding my last year in the Pharm.D. program which is actually my 6th total year in school.
Basically = blah blah blah here's what I'm doing from now on:
To get licensed in the glorious state of Ohio (and there is NO state more glorious-er) you are required to have 1500 hours of experience/intern hours under the direct supervision of a licensed pharmacist. The college of pharmacy was tired of their silly graduates not getting this requirement done on their own, and since the Pharm.D. program was started, the final (4th) year of the program was designed to get students the vast majority of these hours and expose them to a good variety of pharmaceutical practices. As the hours required to get licensed have increased (previously 1200), the number of months required by the college has gone up.
They now require me to complete nine month-long rotations in the 11 month period from July 2010 to May 2011. There are certain requirements regarding months needed in hospital or outpatient settings, etc.
The conditions required to complete each rotation varies. Some pharmacists will simply teach you and plug you in as if you were filling their role for the day, other pharmacists will have you do research/projects/community events; it varies a lot from one to the next.
The only consistent, unalterable, and sucky condition: each rotation must add up to 168 hours in a month, which means that I will contribute on average 42 hours of unpaid labor every week for 9 out of the next 11 months. Great.
To figure out where I'd be going next year, I had to go through a process that involved my scouring over 800 preceptors (preceptors is our fancy word for a pharmacist that agrees to take on a pharmacy student but not pay them) to check their availability, put together a massive grid of possibilities and backup schedules, and then putting together my ideal schedule and submitting it to the college; and then they send me back their ideal schedule for me which strangely enough, didn't look anything like the one I submitted. After a few weeks of negotiating, trading, and begging, here is the final schedule for my last year in pharmacy school:
July 2010- The Apothecary Shop - This is a specialty compounding pharmacy in Columbus. They do the fun manipulations of drugs that we can only pretend we're capable of at CVS. A couple common examples:
1. A patient is allergic to a dye used in a name-brand drug and no other formulations are commercially available. We can compound tablets/capsules/solutions with the active ingredient but without the allergen.
2. A pediatric patient refuses to take a nasty-tasting but totally necessary medicine: we can take their medicine and turn it into a lollipop, popsicle, all sorts of fun things.
This was one of my first choice rotations because I always like to construct things, this satiates my desire to have a mad scientist setup involving bubbling beakers and crazy devices on a lab bench, and you know the patients actually value your service (because coming to this place is expensive, rarely covered by insurance, and not down the usual beaten path for patients to get their meds)
August 2010 - Cardinal Health Division of Nuclear Pharmacy - I will be working at Cardinal in Dublin down in the 5-stories-underground nuclear pharmacy (it only sounds dangerous.) This has always been a fascinating field for me and a definite career interest. An excellent description of what the heck nuclear pharmacy is can be found here: http://nuclear.pharmacy.purdue.edu/what.php
It's great that I got assigned to Cardinal because they do the radiopharmaceuticals for the majority of the hospitals around here, and thus, are the most likely nuclear pharmacy to hire me due to their massive size. Gotta bring my A-game to this rotation.
I mean, how cool would it be when people ask what you do and you say "Nuclear
September 2010 - Ohio State University Medical Center - Division of Nuclear Pharmacy - More of the same, though I think this will be more hands-on and about the daily radiopharmaceutical dispensing routine while the Cardinal preceptor would be more on the business/logistics side. Still, since I'm very interested in this specialty, it's definitely good to get as much exposure (experience exposure, not radiation exposure) in this field as possible.
That's just the first 3 of 9 rotations I'll be doing. I realize this entry has already become quite verbose and I'll write about the remaining rotations as they come up.
Want to know what sucks? I need 1500 hours to sit for the board exams... I already have over 2300 working at CVS. There is no legal need for me to do any of these rotations, I only have to because they are set in stone as part of OSU's degree program. Bleh. I would spell out the totally unnecessary financial hit this entails but it's too depressing to put the numbers down in writing.
Speaking of my expansive time at CVS, they have started to woo me. They brought me, and the other ~10 students in my class that have worked for them through school, to a fancy seafood dinner and started luring us in with the big dollar signs. I'm glad I shaved and got dressed up for the event because my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss were there. We filled out forms about where we hope to practice after we get licensed and we were told we'll be getting offer letters in September. I already know my boss (squared) and boss (cubed) like me and want to keep me in their district/region and they said they anticipate having an opening for me.
So, basically I got to eat fancy salmon on their dime and was told I'd be getting a high-paying job in the area I've lived for 22 years. If this is how you woo me, CVS, keep it coming.
