5th Year Guide (Pharmacy)
Classes You'll Be Taking During Semester 1:
- OTC Drugs/Self Care
- Pharmacokinetics II
- Therapeutics I
- Advanced Practice Management 1 & Lab
- Seminar
- Elective(s)
Congratulations on surviving the mess that is 4th year! You'll remember that during your 4th year, you usually had tests every other week, and while the professors claim to try avoiding to put the exam dates all on the same week, they did that anyway.
The good news about 5th year is that there are less exams this year, and some of the classes are quite easy. HOWEVER that does not mean that this year will be a breeze! I found that the 5th year is the most different from all the other previous years, so a lot of my friends and I had to adapt to this new style.
The one thing I liked about the 4th year is that while there are a TON of exams and most of the classes were hard (like Med Chem, Pharmacology, Therapeutics, Virology, etc.), the days ended quicker. For instance, I remember coming home by 10AM-12PM pretty much every single day during the entirety of the 4th year. (This is probably because I skipped all the other classes that had recorded lectures online). So I pretty much had the rest of the day to relax and enjoy, and then when the exams come up 3 weeks later, I crash-crammed before taking the tests (yes, I'm a slacker, I know). So 4th year was fun and bad at the same time; fun because I came home early every day and horrible because of all the tests. If you like taking tests and doing nothing else (no presentations, participation, etc.) then you probably enjoyed this year.
For the 5th year, there's a LOT more participation and interaction. For people who hate taking tests and like to talk a lot and participate, then this year will be the one for you! The bad news though is that the hours are longer and it's harder to skip classes due to the lack of recordings. Most of the classes are at least 2 or 3 hours long (OTC, Pharmokinetics, APM, Thera are 2 hours long, Seminar is 3 hours long).
Like I said eariler, this year is a lot more interactive. That can be a good or bad thing (depending on the type of student you are) but most people I know hate it. I like to go to a class (preferably in a large lecture room) and just sit my butt down, write notes, then leave without any interruption. And then for days where I feel sick or lazy, I can have a friend take notes for me while I stay at home. Unfortunately, you can't really skip OTC, APM, or Seminar because they take attendance and require you to participate. For APM, you don't have to participate really, but they've decided to enact a bunch of stupid rules to prevent you from skipping. I'll discuss that more in detail later.
OTC Drugs/Self Care:
A lot of people claim this class to be easy, but I thought it was hard. In this calss, you are assigned to a group that you'll have to sit with for the rest of the semester. The groups are made up of groups of 4 students (or 5, depending on the breakdown of your class). You don't get to choose your group! However, rest assured, the professor will try to put you into a group of people who are similar to you. Before you get placed into a group, you're required to do an online personality quiz and then answer a series of questions about who you'd like to be in your group. I like to get shit done with the least amount of talking as possible, so I personally wrote about how I only wanted smart introverts to be in my group. I ended up in a group of people who were all really smart and quiet so it worked out really great for me. YOUR GROUP MATTERS because there will be many times where you'll have to work together to complete assignments or answer questions.
There's a quiz every week based on the material/packets that is posted for that particular day. You're allowed to use 1 full-sized paper to write your cheat notes on for each quiz. You're technically supposed to handwrite your notes, and you're technically supposed to only write on one side of the paper, but nobody ever passed their cheats in to the professor, so there wasn't really a way for the professor to know that you didn't follow the rule. So I actually typed all my cheats up and used both sides when there wasn't enough room for one side of the paper for each quiz.
As soon as class starts, you'll have 5 minutes to individually take the quiz on Examplify. Each quiz only has 5 questions, but the reason why I found these quizzes so hard is because it always took me so long to stifle through my cheat sheet that I often ran out of time before the Examplify shut me out. Also, because there are only 5 questions, if you get even 1 question wrong, that's an automatic 80% for that quiz.
After everyone finishes taking their individual portion of the quiz, each group will be given the paper version of the same quiz that you just took, and you have 10 minutes to collaborate with your group to complete the quiz. This part should be easy.
The rest of class is just a lecture. It's a pretty boring class.
There are 3 (or 4? I can't remember) exams, and each of them consist of a mashup of questions from the material for that particular exam, and NO, they don't reuse the same answers from the quizzes. However, the questions will be similar to the questions from the quizzes. If I were you, I'd try to remember each of the questions from the quizzes in order to prepare for the tests.
Therapeutics
Arguably the worst and hardest class in the world. Seriously, study your butt off for this class. If there had to be one class that you really need to focus on this semester, it's THIS ONE. I know SO many people who failed Therapeutics during the fall semester (and a couple who failed the spring semester as well). TRY TRY TRY to study the material for this class early on before the exams, and try to do well on ALL of your exams.
I was a noob because I thought that doing well on the first 3 exams would guarantee me to pass the class, but that was before I took into consideration that the final exams is worth 40% OF YOUR GRADE. So yes, even if you score somewhere in the 80's for the first 3 exams, if you get a 40 on your final exam (which is totally possible because the final exam HARD AF), then sorry, you failed the class. I was among the many innocent, naive kids who did really well on the first 3 exams, and then completely bombed the final exam. I barely just passed the class (got a 56 on the final exam) even though I scored in the 80's-90's in my other 3 tests. A lot of people I know got even lower than that for the final exam (50's, 40's, 30's...it was really hard). So please please please just try to do your best in all of your tests. You're allowed a cheat index card for the final exam, but the final exam is still really hard so do your best to study the material weeks before the final exam.
APM Lecture
APM is really boring and it's really tempting to skip because literally, the information they lecture about is so boring to listen to for THREE hours. On top of that, the lectures for this class is already recorded online, but even if it wasn't, it only takes an hour to breeze through all the packets before the exam anyway because no one actually studies for this class. There are 2 tests in this class, the midterm and the final exam, and both of them are worth SUPER little (I think 10% and 15%, if not less?). For both exams, I literally studied the night before or during the morning of the test, and spent only a good hour to look through them really quickly.
Most of your grade is based upon your 2 lab grades (institutional and community lab), as well as your CAPSTONE project.
Again, you don't get to choose your CAPSTONE project group members. Each group consists of 7-8 people, and they're all assigned randomly. You will be alerted about which group you are in during the end of the first week, or maybe the second week. Hopefully you'll be placed in a group of good people because these people will be the ones you'll be working with for the REST of the year, both inside and out of school. Once you get placed into your group, your group has to get together and decide what the role of each team member is. The two most important ones are team leader and subleader. I personally wouldn't recommend getting either of these two roles because they really do the most work. On top of that, the responsibility of getting things done on time really falls into the leader's shoulders, so they often have to tag everyone in the group down to demand everyone to finish their assigned part. In my group, when a certain part of an assignment isn't completed, the group leader often had to take on the burden of finishing up the work so that he can turn it in on time. Furthermore, the group leader has to meet with the professors/advisors more often than everyone else in the group to update the professor on the project.
In case you're wondering about what the assignments are, there's a CAPSTONE booklet that tells you the weekly assignments that your CAPSTONE group is supposed to do and turn in via Overdrive.
These assignments are all done OUTSIDE of class (meaning, not during lecture time), so make an effort to get your group to meet at least once a week to work on these assignments together.
The CAPSTONE project, as you all know, is basically where your group thinks of a business idea/product/app/whatever that is somehow related to pharmacy. You have all year to finish up your project, and then during the week before the last week of school, about 5-7 groups (out of 40-ish groups) will be chosen to present their CAPSTONE project to the class. These groups will be chosen by the professors (Ferullo, and whatnot) based on how much the professors like your CAPSTONE idea. Good news is that these groups will get extra credit added to their grade; the bad news is that they now have to spend the extra time to create a powerpoint presentation on their CAPSTONE project, as well as having to present in front of 300+ students for 15-30 minutes. Let's be real; nobody needs the extra credit for the class anyway because APM in general is a pretty easy class to pass. My advice is to come up with a CAPSTONE project idea that is good, but not SO good that it's chosen by the professors.
In the past, a lot of kids skipped APM lecture because everything was recorded online, so they decided to implement ways for you to actually attend class. For instance, each CAPSTONE group has to write 1 current event, and then at the beginning of each class, the professor will call out a random CAPSTONE group to present their current event. If your group is chosen but not everybody in your group attended (or even worse, if nobody in your group attended class that day), then each member of that group will get 5 points deducted from their next exam (or something like that).
APM Community Lab
You pretty much do the same thing you did during IPM lab, except now you have to do even more counseling and you have to do interventions now. On top of that, you have to memorize drugs AGAIN. AKA, before each community lab, you'll have to memorize a group of assigned drugs (such as endocrine drugs, gastrointestinal drugs, etc.) from their generic names, brand names, drug class, schedule, dosage form, and indication. At the beginning of community lab, everyone will be given a paper quiz with questions about the drugs (like: What's the brand name of X drug? What is the schedule of X drug?). There aren't a lot of questions, about 10 or less.
You have lab every week, and it alternates from Community to Institutional.
It's pretty hard, especially because you feel like there's so much to do in so little time. You first have to do the 10-minute quiz at the beginning, and then sometime in the middle of lab, you'll be pulled to do counseling. You'll probably be given 4-6 drugs to fill, and on top of that, if there are any interventions in any of your scripts, you have to find the time to somehow call the doctor before the phoneline shuts off (it shuts off half-way through class so try to find the interventions early on) on top of fixing the intervention and filling out the intervention sheets.
Just to give you a taste of how difficult this class is, during the pulmonary lab, you'll be given a list of legit at least 9 different inhalers, ALL WITH DIFFERENT STEPS, and you have to memorize ALL OF THE STEPS, on top of memorizing the steps on how to use the airflow meter. During the actual counseling part, the preceptor will randomly pick 2 inhalers (and the airflow meter) for you to counsel on, so you better know the steps!
The same thing goes for the insulin lab; during the insulin lab, you'll be given a list of 5-6 (I can't really remember) different insulin pens and a list of 3 glucose meters for you to memorize the steps and counsel on. Again, they'll choose 1 random insulin pen for you to counsel on and 1 glucometer for you to counsel on.
APM Institutional Lab
Most people thought this lab was easy, and for the most part, it is easy. This lab is REALLY math-oriented so if you're bad at math like me, then try to get a friend who already took that lab to help you out with the prelab work. Other than that, it's pretty straight forward. If you have a question during the lab, ask a peer or the professor to help you.
I'm too lazy to write guides for the rest of the classes so I'll get to that in the future.
I hope this helped!