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Living Well In the Life of a Pharmacist

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Becoming a pharmacist is a very time consuming process. Students must complete all of the pre-pharmacy requirements, take licensure exams, and finally get into and graduate from an accredited pharmacy school with a Doctor of Pharmacy degree. While that might not sound like a lot, it takes eight years of hard work. A lot of undergraduates journey into the field with visions of dollar signs floating in their heads. Then they start taking their pre-pharmacy courses and decide that maybe becoming a pharmacist is not their calling. Many people have told me that hard work and determination going into a precise goal will get you anywhere you want to go in this world. My grandfather has told me countless times “Don’t blame someone else for you …show more content…

The scientific portions of the requirement ask students to take sixteen credit hours of Chemistry, which include College Chemistry I and II and Organic Chemistry I and II. Students must also take eight credit hours of Biology, which include the courses Principles of Biology I, Human Anatomy and Physiology I, and finally Human Anatomy and Physiology II. Undergraduates also are required to take English, Literature, History, Fine Arts, Philosophy, Social Science, Statistics, and Physics (Smith). If you appreciate math and science, then pharmacy might be an option one might contemplate. However, that is a lot of work in only two years! When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Everyone I have talked to about college says that the first two years are the hardest, they did not lie! After all of the pre-requisites for pharmacy school have been met, it is time to take the dreaded PCAT. PCAT stands for Pharmacy College Admission Test. It is a standardized test administered to prospective pharmacy school students (Pearson). The best I have heard it described is an enormous version of the ACT. There are seven sections to be taken in about four and a half hours. The sections include Verbal Ability, Quantitative Ability, Biology, Chemistry, Reading Comprehension and two writing sections (Pearson). The writing sections should be the easiest because of the superb training I am now receiving by my instructor. Many students are spectacle about

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