Do the “New” Schools put out “Dispensing BOTS”?
I found this in my Facebook messages. It was dated August, 2011. I rarely check those Facebook messages.
It is not possible to not have noticed the “new” pharmacy schools. They are clearly for-profit. Some of them offer an accelerated program. Some of these kids come out with no clue of what you use a mortar & pestle for. I watched a kid who was floating for a day look at an Rx that would require compounding. A simple three ingredient cream. His problem is that he did not know what aa qs ad meant. I have little experience with these “new” pharmacy schools. I have done no research. Help us out here. Tell us what you know. By the way, I know nothing about the Feik School of Pharmacy. It may or may not be “new”. I had never heard of it. I found the images and the name of the school indicates that it is parochial. If you have a better example, tell me. I will replace the images.
Give me more you guys. Make it your mission to help us “out” these schools. The industry needs “Pharmacy Merchants”. We are in a “business”, like it or not. These “Dispensing Robots” cheapen pharmacy. My friend Davey just graduated. He has plenty of experience interning with WAG. He is a pharmacy merchant. Put him beside a robot and the choice is easy. I will publish a list right here. Name of school. Annual cost. Tuition, books, room, board and miscellaneous. Important if they are a less than 6 year school. Fuck it, man. Compounding is the quintessential skill of pharmacists. It is a lucrative skill and will get better. We cannot tolerate people who cannot compound calling themselves pharmacists. Period. At the very least, a pharmacist must be able to do a “Cancer Cocktail” and figure out how much of a 12% and how much of a 6% do you use to make 60 Gm of a 9%.
Jay Pee 8:00 PM, 7/21-12
The message from Facebook
With all these for profit right wing religious “pharmacy” schools here in the South (most unprogressive anti-worker but self proclaimed Moral hypocrites place I have ever been) are pumping out corporate dispensing bots, what is going to become of pharmacists? ………Is the aging of the population and expansion of benefits to the working poor (thru healthcare reform) going to absorb these lower academically able corporate tools? Am I negative today. Problem is I know some of these pro-corporate, anti-worker future pharmacists and their “religious” backgrounds for despising all but the wealthy and successful. Got cancer. It is your own fault.
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I searched their website and it appears that first graduating class – dumped on the market place was 2010.
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Here is a June 21, 2012 BOP meeting from Hawaii
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http://hawaii.gov/dcca/pvl/boards/pharmacy/board-meeting-minutes/Pharmacy_120621.pdf
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read page three… couldn’t cut/paste.. where the representative of U of H was asked what they were doing about the RPH surplus… it gives a insight in how they really care about the profession
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We have a “new” private 3yr RPH school in our neighborhood ..just graduated third class – and raised its tuition ~ 40% for next year.. and while I have not had much experience with these students.. some of my colleagues that have… have stated that generally they are not terribly been impressed.
Steve, I found your link to the HI BOP to be very interesting. Here is the tuition estimate for the above mentioned pharmacy school. That leaves little doubt about the reality that these new grads will put up with anything and anyone just to get a job. I mourn daily for the death of pharmacy practice as we knew it.
http://www.uiw.edu/busoff/documents/AY2012TuitionFees.pdf
PS. Do you think Colbert Hall is named after Stephen?
http://www.uiw.edu/housing/documents/2011-2012RoomandMealRates_008.pdf
@Bcmigal… my understanding that Sullivan University http://www.sullivan.edu/pharmacy/index.asp
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they raised their tuition from the 30K something to 40K something for the coming year. Of course they also have a 12 month Pharmacy tech program and a professional NANNY program.
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Career Diploma, in as little as 12 months
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If you look at their website.. they have about 80 odd different “programs” tracks…
bcmigal: I suppose if UIW were in South Carolina, that could be conceivable RE: Stephen Colbert
Yea I just graduated. My school is one of the new “for-profits”. Tuition goes up yearly but isn’t the highest in the state. When I graduated it was approximately 40k a year not counting room (approx 400-500 a month in an apartment off-campus, not including all utilities), books (roughly 200-700 a semester) and of course incidentals and other financial obligations one might have coming in. Now, tuition is something like 44k a year.
It is true that many new graduate pharmacists coming out are pretty pro-establishment if they even have any discernible political views to begin with. And as far as creating “dispensing bots”, it really depends on who you are as a person; a lot of people remark that the general life philosophies of the administration at the school sets the key for how the students will be—especially if the student has been so busy studying to get to this place the past few years that time hasn’t been afforded to them to develop personalities, affinities or strong moral character in the meanwhile. We definitely had our fair share of students whose dream, as has been verbalized, is to “climb the corporate ladder”—something I say with a wince because if one sees school as a temporary barrier to becoming “somebody”, I think that “going corporate” to find your success is a permanent way of remaining “nobody” in the self-actualization sense.
I remember one remarkable student at my school who was in the class behind me talking about how ambitious he was to prove himself, change the status quo in health care and go above and beyond in the profession now that he had been given the chance; I was impressed because this is pretty rare in health care grad students I’ve come to realize and he spoke in ardorous terms that inspired me. However, the very next year I observed him in the hall interacting with people and realized the pressures of our campus culture and perhaps peer culture had gotten to him and that he was now allowing himself to be sculpted into a future corporate tool as he began taking it upon himself to schedule some pharm chains to come to the school; he wanted to be known as the man inviting them to the campus to disseminate information and recruit, but I had the sense deep down that he wasn’t really personally driven by doing this, but that he was doing it furnish relationships with these companies in the “corporate ladder climbing” direction. He let himself change, and I felt dismay that he didn’t have the stones to remain that same guy I talked to the year before, and not fitting in with his peers, adopted an employer’s idea of what pharmacist professionalism is instead of trusting his own. This phenomenon is of course not restricted to pharmacy, and one can see this manifest itself daily in the news; politicians selling themselves out, even down to what they’ll admit they truly believe, just to “fit in” with the majority and get their vote.
I’ve observed that students with potential in the sense that the Pharmacy Alliance sees it, right at the beginning of their studies at my school, are incredibly proactive, confident and “real” and are clearly empowered by their newly embarked upon journey into professionalism—they haven’t yet been threatened by the triumvirate: Institution, Financial Lenders and Peers, into being boxed into a certain kind of existence. I think the most sophisticated and aware of the students (a small entourage as the case may be) become shocked at the prescribed and TRUE culture of pharmacy school which is very right wing, intolerant of that which is non-traditional and novel and generally unsupportive of making its students so-called Renaissance men/women; that is, the schools aren’t interested in or may very well be somewhat opposed to ensuring their students stay well-rounded, mentally healthy and certainly create obstacles to students having the privilege of unobstructed and honest communication with each other and all echelons of the school. The school preaches and inculcates in us very flawed criteria, IMO, of what it means to be professional; much of it encouraging selfless behavior that can be seen as deleterious to an individual’s well-being when its implicitly a daily expectation (i.e. filling/checking more scripts per hour than is safe).
Since the vast majority of the students are more interested in remaining out of sight (my observation is that pharmacy students are predominantly shy and/or lacking genuine confidence), forming alliances for studying and just keeping their training experience as academic/theoretical as possible, this sedating of actual intelligent input by the students into the school becomes a powerful selector of behavior as students develop distance from and deliberate self-suppression from thinking about and acting on the issues that truly trouble them. Indeed, the schools pick them carefully, and this particular demographic of students not only avoid having to truly question the methods with which they are being molded into yes-men, they embrace the fact because, like the student I described above, they actually deep-down think the yes man has the most to show for themselves, and that to them is the type of success their parents and friends will be impressed by. I think what I’m trying to say is that not only do many of the schools not have the best interests of the profession at heart, but so too do many of the students.
Do I need a job? Oh yes. Big time. The financial picture looming above me like a nefarious tower is one thing; the other thing is my school failed to turn me into a yes man, but not because they didn’t try. It almost tore it out with many nasty emails from admin, personal talks with professors who warned me about sticking up for myself in certain work-related and internship-related scenarios that came up and of course my run-ins with certain classmates who identified me as a non-subscriber to the proselytizing we were all undergoing to become over-educated, but spineless (which to me is a broken, incomplete professional in any field). But it was in school that I learned of how pharmacists would cook each other over a spit if given the opportunity for advancement, or throw them under a bus in order to actualize this desire to “climb the corporate ladder”; they seem to erroneously think that this occurs by knocking the person next to, or just above them, off their rung. To some of them, it’s about looking better than the other at all times. Others are more lacking in the desire to “climb”, but while they are more reasonably minded, they also have families and other obligations and simply don’t feel enough relation to the tiny minority of pharmacists who have more self respect than the average bear. I did not want to become this, and I’ve yet to get the answer from experience about whether this even matters. I believe everybody is a person and the fatalist in me says that everyone ends up where they belong, whether a yes/no/maybe man
All in all, my school gave me a degree so that I may sit for board exams. And their insatiable thirst for 40k a year of some random bank’s’ name, with me as recipient, changed my debt status drastically in 4 years. However, and maybe I paid for it and got nothing, I still feel like the same person I was in 2008 before I started. I will always at least hesitate to do something someone tells me to do if I assess with my ethical reasoning and find it’s either not the right thing, it’s a selfish thing (f0r them) or otherwise. I don’t think my school intended for me to be like this—apparently their reputation hinges on how readily I will carry out a task for an employer without questioning—be a “good little boy”. But they did intend to make a mint off of me financially, and I guess that genie in the lamp continues to deliver as they import new vibrant, optimistic students that they will soon attempt to mold into what they think a pharmacist should be…A Robot?
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Thanks, Cal. We must be sure that we do not paint with too broad a brush. There were “Dispensing Bots” 40 years ago.That’s a lot of money. $40 grand plus. Did your school have the appropriate labs? Dispensing and Operative pharmacy?
Oh and JP, I may be a new pharmacist but your compounding question is a sinch: 30g each of the 12% and 6%.
Have I ever made a triamcinolone compound, or pilocarpine eye drops? No. But it would be awesome
@Cal .. what you describe .. has a label on “the hill” to describe what happens to freshman Congressmen …it is called co-oped … and what you described is highly accurate with the exception that most preceptors have the same mindset.. of co-oping the students into the program.
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Keep your independent ideas.. and while you will get your lumps along the way… at least you can hold your head up and know that you did not become a minion
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In the corporate world .. CYA yourself with proper documentation.. and let management & HR know that you are “keeping score”.. unless you do.. they will have nothing by “I don’t remember that”
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Keep copies of emails, faxes and the like.. to add to your documentation
JP, we had a “pharmacy lab” class and some non-descript dispensing machines that I never witnessed working. Not sure what is mean by “operative pharmacy” but I could tell you most of what I know at this moment in time came from my final year rotations and studying like mad for boards the past 4 weeks.
It’s such a wonder, even to me, that I’m so willing to walk away from the plight of the pharmacy student now that I’m out. Especially at my school, I feel dearly for the students still in the “trenches”, but they’ll make it.
And Steve, yes. Co-oping. Is that pronounced Coe-Aup-ing? I’d like to start using this term where appropriate. JP calls it “institutionalization” when the conditioning takes place in the workplace. Love all the terminology; it’s very descriptive and gives definition to phenomena that have no terms in lay society.
And just a point of clarification in my long post above: I am not in any way, um, political. I don’t subscribe to any party, I just want to know that those in power who are steering the ship actually CARE about the ship. While pharmacy is mainly right wing and I tend to shift left of center on my views, I have nothing against conservatives in general. Since some of you know who I am I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being understood as sectarian or anything. That said, the way pharmacy professionals are potted, watered and sprouted is dwarfed by the even more totalitarian and ultra-conservative institutions bearing medical doctors as fruit. They go through a more intense hell and for longer. I try to remember this whenever I have a bone to pick with a physician. We’re all professionals, and, again, we are all people and deserve the respect due to the overworked.
Ok, that’s all.