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In writing this book with physicians, I realized that although the core math and science classes prepharmacy and prepharmacy students take are virtually identical, there is one significant difference in how they need to approach their respective colleges – and why pharmacy students need to start preparing for residency admissions as soon as possible – and read this book. Here are some important statistics.

About half of students who want to get into a pharmacy school get in each year.

Over eighty percent of pharmacy applicants get into pharmacy school in each year.

But when it comes to earning a residency at graduation, the percentages reverse.

Only half of graduating pharmacy students who enrolled in the match will earn a residency placement, while 80 percent of all pharmacy residency applicants will earn one.

Both professions have a way of ensuring only a select group makes it to a clinical residency, but they are opposites in how they do it.

That doesn’t mean that pharmacy students don’t need to study and work hard. They do as certain residency specialties are a lot harder to get into than others. They have an exam, the USMLE, in their second year of pharmacy school, which is a big part of this selection process. But for pharmacy students, this lower residency match rate as compared to pharmacy students has many implications, from changing how they approach applying to colleges of pharmacy to what they do throughout their years there.