I got out of class at about 8:30 and was home before 9am. Obviously I didn’t stay for the massage. It was the last day for 5 classmates; they’re starting their externships next week. All of us pharm.tech people are being farmed out to one large retail pharmacy chain (I won’t mention which one it is, but it’s the biggest one in the US), in different stores, and everyone’s doing interviews this week. And according to several of them, the shit is hitting the fan regarding the externships because of several things:

• We were told to expect to be hired by the company/store we do our externships at. Half of those who did their interviews at these stores were told that the positions may not be as permanent as expected.
• When we went through the application process at the beginning of class, we were told to expect to get at least $11-12/hr from anyplace that hired us after we graduated and finished the externship, and more than that once we passed our big test and considered CPhTs. Only 1 out of the 5 students has been quoted that rate, everyone else was quoted roughly the same amount that anyone walking in off the street would receive, around $8.50-9. Not a rate you expect after shelling out $12,000.
• Managers interviewing students and not having any clue what the externship consists of or what school it is. Managers who did have a clue mocking the school and the choice to pay money to go to school for a position that the company will generally train people to do if they want it.
• Students told that should they be hired after the externship, management won’t consider their schooling/experience at all when deciding wages and responsibility, instead they start at the very bottom rung of the ladder and are considered nothing more than counter help for the first 4.5 months (6 weeks of internship + 3 months after that if they’re hired permanently), or saying flat out that they had no need for us and were only doing it because someone higher up is making them do it.
• District managers completely unwilling to try to work to get people into stores close to students’ houses. Mind you, this is a chain that could be considered the pharmacy version of Starbucks in this area.

This is all on top of the fact that the graduating people have had to constantly hound the education and career services offices to even help us out - we’re supposed to know where our externships are 2 weeks before we graduate because of the interview stuff prior to leaving, and our class was given roughly a week and all told to call the same district manager, who was on vacation at the time everyone was told to call her, adding to the delay even more. One of the career service women came in yesterday to discuss things, and we brought up the question of whether or not they would be arranging for us to take the PTCB, since they’re the ones paying for us to take it, and she had no clue that we even had a certification exam and needed to look into it.

Current Mood:  annoyed