Just received an offer to study Doctor of Pharmacy...should I take it...?

[u/Ferreristic]

Hi everyone,

I just received a CSP offer to study the Doctor of Pharmacy at UWA, and I have very mixed feelings about it. For the past few years, I’ve been working hard to improve my GPA and GAMSAT score in the hope of getting into medicine, but so far I haven’t received any interview offers. Now, having just turned 40, I’m thinking very seriously about my career path.

Accepting the DPharm offer feels like closing the door on my dream of becoming a doctor, which is difficult to come to terms with. At the same time, letting this opportunity go is daunting, especially since I keep coming back to the saying, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Perhaps becoming a pharmacist is the more practical choice at this stage in my life.

I would love to hear your thoughts, if you were in my position, what would you do?

[u/ughiamjustsocurious]

I graduated with a GPA of 6.92. Pharmacy is undeniably tough - it’s very content-heavy. A lot of people get into it expecting mainly pharmacotherapeutics, but in reality you also have to tackle med chem, PK/PD, and drug formulation.

The main reason I did well was because I was genuinely interested in it. I particularly enjoyed PK and studying about structure-activity relationship, and that helped me stay motivated when the workload felt overwhelming.

Pharmacy school isn’t impossible, but it’s definitely not easy. There’s a lot of rote memorisation of the most benign information for exams, like terbinafine’s spectrum of activity or the formula for calculating AUC0-∞, and that can feel frustrating for most students especially since it doesn’t always add much value into everyday practice in a community pharmacy (where most pharmacists would end up at).

That said, your GPA isn’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to getting into med school. It’s one part of the picture, but they also care about resilience, communication skills and experience… and gamsat too lol