Thomas Downey High School

Dear Community Member,Your comments about Pharmacy School and Pharm.D. graduates reflect either extreme naivety or extreme ignorance! Pharmacy Schools such as UC San Francisco are as competitive as many U.S. Medical Schools and Law Schools. The acceptance rate for recent entering classes at UCSF Pharmacy School was on the order of 1/20 applicants and entering student GPAs are well above 3.5. I suggest that before so ignorantly dismissing doctoral degree programs such as Pharmacy, please do your research! Current Pharmacy School graduates in California earn starting salaries in the $150,000 per year range and work along side physicians and other members of the medical care team in such areas as Diabetes Care, Congestive Heart Failure, Anticoagulant Therapy, Medication Therapy, and Primary Care to name but a few. In the future, Pharmacists will be called upon to increase their involvement in direct patient care with their drug therapy expertise. And, Thomas Downey High definitely prepared me to excel in my chosen profession of Pharmacy.

Recent graduate. Pharm school is cute and everything, but TDHS does not prepare you at all for tracking in to heavy hitting professions like law, medicine, and the more competitive doctorates. I felt vastly unprepared for college compared to my classmates at a prestigious university, and that was despite graduating top of my class at TDHS. Extracurricular programs at the school are underfunded, and in some cases poorly managed. Honestly, I would send you students to most other schools in the city over this one. If you don't believe me or agree with me, ask the administration at the sc hool for a list of where their graduates go for the past 10 years, then compare that with other schools.