Earning a degree in pharmacy requires you to apply your intelligence, expand your horizons and rise to new challenges. To succeed, you’ll need an unquenchable curiosity and a strong academic background with a solid grounding in math and science. But if you’ve got what it takes, you’ll find that the field of pharmacy offers you not only financial rewards, but also a whole career’s worth of challenging work that helps to improve the quality of life for the people you serve.
Command Serious Earning Power
Pharmacists enjoy one of the highest average starting salaries of any profession -- $112,000 -- and the current high demand for pharmacists shows no signs of decreasing in the coming years. Significant factors fueling the nation’s growing need for pharmacists include rises in all of the following:
- the number of medications available on the market
- the amount of prescriptions filled each year
- the demand for patient services
- the percentage of the U.S. population classified as elderly
Enjoy Career Flexibility
Pharmacists play key roles in almost every area of modern health care. In addition to traditional pharmacies, you’ll find them at work in hospitals, assisted living facilities, universities, governmental agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry. Coupled with the rising demand for pharmacists nationwide, this means that they not only enjoy a variety of working environments to choose from, but also a great deal of flexibility in deciding the areas where they want to live and work.
Make a Difference
Many people have come to depend on retail pharmacists as their first line of defense in the healthcare system. Community pharmacists provide their patients with information and advice on health, direct them to other sources of health care when necessary, and administer immunizations, screenings, and management for conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure. Pharmacists in clinical research settings develop the medicines of the future to combat disease and dysfunction. At universities, experienced pharmacists educate and train the field’s next generations. And in governmental agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Public Health Service, pharmacists put their expertise to work to help improve the quality of life across the nation.