Big switch, what do you do as a pharmacist? help.

[jkitten14]

hello,
I'm in my 4th year as an undergrad and I was orginally set on med school, but after seriously thinking through what I wanted in life I realized pharmacy may be a better option. 1. I enjoy at least some free time, I don't what to be tired all the time and would like to enjoy something else in life besides work 2. I love organic and inorganic chem. 3. Enjoy some research (I couldnt be a PhD only though)

Basically I was wondering about clinical pharmacy and PharmD/PhD (clinical drug research). I love the clinical side of being a doctor so I was thinking clinical pharmacy. What is the day to day like? From what I know it seems pretty cool. I just need some info and advice about being in the field. I'm going to job shadow,but I thought I would start here.

Thanks Everyone!

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[ShannonIV]

Can't get much more clinical than an MD. Specialty clinical positions in hospitals are few and far between and it requires a lot of experience and just flat out luck. There are a lot of jobs in retail and few jobs in clinical pharmacy. If you really want to be clinical I would suggest you look into nurse practitioner or physicians assistant.

 

[RxWildcat]

Can't get much more clinical than an MD. Specialty clinical positions in hospitals are few and far between and it requires a lot of experience and just flat out luck. There are a lot of jobs in retail and few jobs in clinical pharmacy. If you really want to be clinical I would suggest you look into nurse practitioner or physicians assistant.

Although there are more community jobs than hospital jobs, there are still many clinical positions for pharmacists. You can definitely have a clinical career path as a pharmacist.

 

[janeno]

hello,
I'm in my 4th year as an undergrad and I was orginally set on med school, but after seriously thinking through what I wanted in life I realized pharmacy may be a better option. 1. I enjoy at least some free time, I don't what to be tired all the time and would like to enjoy something else in life besides work 2. I love organic and inorganic chem. 3. Enjoy some research (I couldnt be a PhD only though)

Basically I was wondering about clinical pharmacy and PharmD/PhD (clinical drug research). I love the clinical side of being a doctor so I was thinking clinical pharmacy. What is the day to day like? From what I know it seems pretty cool. I just need some info and advice about being in the field. I'm going to job shadow,but I thought I would start here.

Thanks Everyone!

I definitely recommend you job shadowing both professions with different specialists before you make up your mind. Pharmacy and medicine are two different fields with two different scopes of practice. If you want complete autonomy, a lot of patient interaction, or performing procedures on patients, medicine would be the right route for you. If you don't mind not having as much autonomy as a doctor (because the doctor has prescriptive authority and last saying in the medication therapy), enjoy more clean work environment (no dealing with blood and body fluids), and just prefer having more a consulting job type (meaning you advice will not necessarily be accepted 100% of the time) you should follow the pharmacy career path.
However, pharmacy has various other non-traditional job opportunities as well.