Students should consider reaching out to their experiential education department to learn what opportunities may be available.
Stella Athanas, PharmD, RPh, is the director of experiential education and an assistant professor in the PharmD program at Nova Southeastern University in Davie, Florida. Previously, she worked for the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, in the outpatient, inpatient, and oncology settings and served as a coleader in the smoking cessation group and cardiac rehabilitation program.
As a pharmacy student, I clearly remember being taught that there were 2 primary career paths: hospital pharmacy and community pharmacy. These were the pillars of our curriculum, the options most frequently discussed, and, at the time, the only paths I believed were available to me.
Like many students, I gravitated toward what I knew. I began working in an independent community pharmacy and quickly found myself drawn to the fast-paced, constantly moving nature of retail practice. I thrived in the chaos. Yet, despite enjoying the environment, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. I often felt disconnected from the bigger picture of patient care, limited to prescribing without a full understanding of patients’ medical histories or direct collaboration with their health care teams. That disconnect left me questioning whether I had chosen the right career.
A conversation with a pharmacist friend changed everything. She introduced me to outpatient pharmacy, a practice setting I had barely heard mentioned during my training. The idea immediately resonated with me: a retail-like environment combined with access to patient medical records and onsite health care providers. For the first time, I saw a role that blended efficiency with comprehensive patient care. It felt like discovering a hidden option I never knew existed, and I eagerly pursued it.
That decision opened doors I could not have anticipated. After several years in outpatient practice, I joined the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. This experience profoundly shaped my professional growth. There, I remained rooted in outpatient pharmacy while gaining exposure to inpatient care and oncology, 2 areas I had never imagined myself entering. Each transition broadened my understanding of pharmacy practice and reinforced an important lesson: Careers in pharmacy are rarely linear.
As my experience grew, so did my involvement in helping student pharmacists. What began as a professional responsibility quickly became a passion. Working with students, watching their confidence develop, and helping them navigate uncertainty sparked a new interest in academia. Eventually, that interest became my next career chapter.
Today, I serve as director of experiential education for a PharmD program. In this role, I have been exposed to an even wider range of pharmacy careers, many of which are still unfamiliar to students navigating their professional futures. Looking back, I often reflect on how much I didn’t know early in my career and how valuable it would have been to hear these stories sooner.
My goal now is to share these insights with student pharmacists who feel unsure about which path is right for them. Pharmacy offers far more possibilities than the traditional narratives suggest, and sometimes, the most fulfilling careers are found in the paths we didn’t even know existed.
In my current role, I can see pharmacy practice from a different angle: through the eyes of students, preceptors, faculty, and health systems. It continues to surprise me how many career paths exist beyond the traditional settings. My goal is to introduce some of these rotation types to pharmacy students early on, because students are not lacking ambition; they lack exposure. This is an opportunity for students to explore these options while completing their advanced pharmacy practice experience.
These roles only represent a small glimpse of the nontraditional career paths available in pharmacy. I encourage pharmacy students to reach out to their experiential education department to learn about other opportunities that may be available—what they find may surprise them.
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