First ofall, I would like to congratulate all of you for picking such an excellent career. This is a great career choice. As a someone who is about to graduate from this school at the end of the school year, I think it is my responsibility to give you one piece of sound advice: DO NOT GO TO THIS SCHOOL, especially If you have other options. This school changed the way its curriculum was set up the year before I entered and it has done a terrible job with the new curriculum. It is slowly fixing the bugs year by year, but it is no where near finished even now. Administratively speaking, this school is extremely poorly run. Policies change drastically on a yearly basis. The administration is hyper-reactionary in its response to what it views as problems. My P-2 year, most of my classmates got almostall A's in most of the classes. The school freaked out and said "oh no we cannot have this many students getting an A grade, what will it look like" . SO the following year in all the classes the grading scale was changed from a B being>80 my year, to being >85 for the class after mine. And what it took toget a A and C were also increased. And the school changed how much your group work grade was worth when calculatingyour overall grade, from a 40% down to ~17%. The year before me, the group grade was worth nearly 50% of the course grade. Fact is, when you work in agroup, your grade will go up almost every time as 4 heads are better than 1 usually.
Also, from the class I started with we have lost nearly 20% of the students we started with for various reasons, some were unfairly kicked out for not being able to keep up inthe school's eyes, others became disabled, and death was also another cause. One was kicked out merely for accusing the staff of being racially biased in grading their paper. So, when the student's grade dipped they threw the student out and posted "Wanted" signs in the professor's offices that read "call thepolice if this person is seen in the building." This is VERY unprofessionalbehavior to say the least. I could go on as there are many other stories like this.
Most of the professors that had been working here for years and whom had placed a intricatepart in giving this school such a good reputation as a education institutionare gone. There is a heavy influx of new and young professors who are knowledgeable about the material they teach. Unfortunately these people have little to no background in actually "TEACHING" their material to you or how to properly test you. I am lucky that I made it this far, but, I do I have my fair share of scars from going through this program. If you know for sure that you want to be a clinical pharmacist, then this school may be an option for you. If you are able to make it through the rigors of this program, then you will be ready for a job in clinical pharmacy. But, I can't promise that you will have the requisite grades to compete for admission into a top quality residency program. If you are not sure that you wish to be a clinical pharmacist, do not waste your time going through the Pharm.D program at VCU. All in all, if you have no choice but to go here as this is the only place you got into, then go ahead andaccept the admission and hang on tight as it will be a VERY bumpy ride. Otherwise, if I were you I wouldgo to another school even if you have to pay out-of-state tuition. Going to another school may cost more, but you will get a much better level of education.