Guest nuck123 Posted April 12, 2006 Report Share Posted April 12, 2006 Hello This forum is extremely helpful and hopefully some of you can give me some advice. I am currently in my 4th year of pharmacy school and after much contemplation, I've decided that I want to pursue a career in medicine. However, I have quite a few hurdles to overcome and I was hoping that some of you could give me some advice. I have quite bit of extracurricular experience and work experience and I have been accepted into a hospital pharmacy residency program that I am supposed to start after I graduate this May. My problem is that I'm going to be graduating with a pretty low gpa. My gpa is around 74% or 75% and I know that I have to raise my grades significantly to make myself more competitive during the application process. Unfortunately, my grades have been consistently around 75% so I can't use the last 60 credit rule to my advantage. I am wondering if it would be worthwhile for me to complete the hospital residency program or would it be better for me to go back to school to raise my gpa? Will the hospital residency benefit my application a great deal? The options i'm considering are doing an MHA or MPH (I do have an interest in public health) or going back to UBC to do another bachelor's degree. Your help would be much appreciated! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest TKP 123 Posted April 12, 2006 Report Share Posted April 12, 2006 75% isn't extremely bad if you look at the GPA breakdown of the people who are accepted. I guess the question is "will you will be regreted after you decline your hospital residency, and go back to school just for the sake of raising GPA?" Seriously, how many subjects that you need to ace in order to bring your 75% overall GPA to something like 80%? You need to take a lot of courses, not to mention you have to ace them all pretty much. How do you value the opportunity to go to a hosptial pharmacy program? Will you learn a lot from there? Do you think you will enjoy it, or are you already hating pharamacy? I don't know too much about MHA and MPH. But I think they are quite different from pharamcy or medicine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest canmic Posted April 12, 2006 Report Share Posted April 12, 2006 It's going to take a LOT of courses (at least a full two years worth) to make a big change in that CGPA and keep in mind that most schools zap you if the majority of your courses weren't 'upper division' so you can't just take a bunch of first year courses to boost your CGPA. Are your circumstances somehow different now in a way which would allow you to have an overall average of 85% or more? (to pull up your previous average to about an 80% or so) What you have to sit down and seriously ask yourself is if you feel that you can do what you would have to do to pull up the marks. Another thing to consider is to finish the pharmacy stuff and then do another degree and re-do your pre-reqs. This would let you take advantage of the 10 year rule and drop some (or all) of your earlier grades. It's worth a shot at applying if you think your ECs would score highly. A 75% overall and last 60 credits would score you about 15 or so out of 25 (rough guess) on your AQ score so you'd need at least a 20 or 21 out of 25 on your NAQ to get an interview. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ubcparamedic Posted April 12, 2006 Report Share Posted April 12, 2006 Do your pharmacy residency, and work and get some wicked experience. Your average isnt that bad, as people always get accepted in the 70-75% range. There is also no guarantee of getting into Meds, so theres no point of throwing away 4 years of hard work to do another Bachelors for the sake of getting into Med, you might as well work, make money, and maybe take a couple of courses on the side Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest nuck123 Posted April 12, 2006 Report Share Posted April 12, 2006 Thanks for your responses. My last 60 credits are about 75% which is what my overall GPA is also. I really have no idea what my NAQ score would be. I have a lot of experience working and volunteering in the health care field. I've also done quite a bit of community service work but based on what i've read on this board, it's really tough to guage what score I may get out of 25 for NAQ. I think doing the residency will probably help my NAQ score but i'm having second thoughts about doing it because i'm not sure if hospital pharmacy is right for me. I'm just wondering if the admissions committee would put more weight on someone that's completed the hospital residency compared to someone that's worked as a community pharmacist. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest kellyl20 Posted April 12, 2006 Report Share Posted April 12, 2006 Go to your hospital residency program, don't think you will regret it. Your marks are low but you must have something going for you to be chosen for the hospital pharm residency. The wages of the pharm program has finally caught up with the community pharms, well almost. Trust me, you will like the program, you get to go on rounds, have patients etc etc. With your GPA, probably it is too low for the schools back east or Edmonton, Saskachewan. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest supa76 Posted April 12, 2006 Report Share Posted April 12, 2006 UBC will also look at your last 24, 27, 36 or whatever credits to give you the best last '60' score, it that helps. I was able to do 24 Unclassified credits before I applied last year, and UBC used these for that exact purpose. It really helped to balance out my low GPA from undergrad. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest physiology Posted April 12, 2006 Report Share Posted April 12, 2006 Doing a hospital pharmacy can be incredibly valuable in terms of exposing you to clinical medicine. You'll often round with PharmDs/clinical pharmacists and get exposure to physicians, nurses, dieticians, etc. Doing a hospital pharmacy is more than just dispensing and filling dialysis bags - but then again, it depends on where you do it. Physio Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pharmgurl Posted April 14, 2006 Report Share Posted April 14, 2006 Hey guys, hospital residency is an incredible experience....you do all these intense rotations through Internal Medicine, Geriatrics, ICU, Infectious Diseases and electives that you want to pursue. I learned tons from the residents/medical students and it helped me understand better what they actually did. However, if you're after the money, it still isn't as good as community pharmacy but you get to use your brain and apply everything you've learned and keep up to date with all the new literature. And....I talked about incidences from my job/residency during my med interview, it gives you a whole new perspective....I would hope you don't turn down this awesome opportunity!! PG Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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