Mrs. Codell is looking for a career change. As many of you know, she is currently a realtor (a relatively successful one too). Her business has no been as bad as most realtors have been lately. But the changes in the market has caused her great concern about the future. She has always talked of becoming a pharmacist. We checked out the Pharmacy School @ UH's website. My wife already has about 1-1/2 years worth of credits from when she went to HBU back in the 90s, which means she would need about 4-4 1/2 years to get her PharmD degree. Anyone know of anyone that is a pharmacist? Any advice? If my wife just decided to go back and finish her degree (no pharmacy school), what should she look at majoring in that can give her the best career opportunities when she graduates (at the age of 42)? Would my wife qualify for student grants/loans even though I make pretty good money (i.e. I make enough to pay all of our bills, 401K, savings, IRA, while she goes to school, but would not have anything left if I had to pay for all of her tuition also)? I know nothing about all this stuff, so any experience from some of you guys fresh out of college would help.
I know a few people applying to pharmacy school now. Its quite competitive these days, b/c salary is good and its a low stress job. She will need to take the PCAT entrance exam. You don't need to necessarily major in a science- you just need to take the 10 or so pre-requisite courses which are required by most all schools. Those along with the PCAT usually are a pain.
I work in a nuclear pharmacy setting and can say nuke pharmacists get very big paychecks. It generally has horrible hours though...a nuclear pharmacy is open from 1am-ish to 5pm-ish. It's even easier than a Walgreens-type pharmacist. The two pharmacists that we have here do little to no interaction with the pharmacy customers. I believe it takes no longer to become a nuclear pharmacist as it does to become a traditional pharmacist.
I don't think you're going to get any need-based aid; maybe a lower rate on subsidized Stafford Loans which I thought were limited to $2750 per semester/term. If she gets really good grades I guess there may be some scholarship opportunities. My mom went back to school after divorcing my dad and got a Pharmacy degree at 47 yrs old in '93, nine years later she showed me a recruiting letter she got from Kroger's advertising starting salaries for Pharmacists at around $75,000 (but I know she was only making $40K or so out of school as a "floater" pharmacist for the area Eckerds's). I think the competitiveness of the particular job market affects salaries, because she's taken job offers down in Brownsville in '96 and Corpus Christi in '04 which helped bump up her salary (the Corpus job was for a little over $100K); possibly because they have a lot less pharmacy grads in those areas. She's done both retail and clinical (hospital) pharmacy: she's had worse interactions with the retail managers, but some pretty brutal hours on the clinical side (10 pm - 7 am at LBJ Hospital). We have a pretty poor relationship now, so I probably can't hit her up for any more info than that.
Your wife has run a successful, high-dollar sales-based business; I think she should major in either finance, marketing or entrepreneurship (U of H has a very well-regarded program). Maybe get on the development side of real estate with Hines, do adversting or try to do retail brokerage for a higher-end broker dealer or asset management firm like Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney, AIM Funds or Van Kampen. And of course there are all kinds of trading and business develpoment opportunities in the energy sector.
If she's already successful maybe she should hang on. It's times like this that weed out the people who flocked to the profession who don't really belong there. She could be put herself into a situation to really reap the rewards for when the market rebounds.
