The Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

Date: Nov 25 2011
Major: Pharmacy (This Major's Salary over time)
There are some positive aspects of the school, but unfortunately the negative aspects far outweigh the positive. The first negative we will start with is the difficulty of the work. The work is challenging, but what makes it unbearable is the teachers have no-remorse. We have had exams on holidays (it was only Halloween not a huge deal)but when you realize you have to spend the whole 2 weeks before that studying it ruins the few days you have to relax, such as Halloween. We also have had an exam the day we got off of Thanksgiving break, which means the whole break was dedicated to studying. While we are on the topics of breaks I'll mention, you do not get a lot of them, and the ones you get are very short. Exams are commonly given back to back weeks. One week Bio exam the next week Chem exam. The teachers act like they care but when it comes down to it they really do not. It seems like their main responsibility is weeding the kids out. Dr. Clarke, the chem teacher, is not awful his lectures you actually learn from, and he provides you with old exams to study from. The bio teacher, Dr. Moon, however is not as good. He provides no study guides. His lectures are useless, he spends about 40% talking about non-sense and the other 60% repeating some of what is in the textbook roughly 40 - 50 % of what you need to know for the exam. The only form of hints that he gives on what is going to be on the exam is SOQ (study objective questions) which seem like they would be helpful but then you realize they address every single thing in the book. The exams are around 10-13 chapter that you need to know IN DETAIL, general understanding will not cut it. For bio each question is worth 2 points and for chem each question is worth 4 points. The exams are designed so you cannot take an educated guess on anything. They give you the real answer, the most common mistake answer, another close answer or another real answer, and then 2 or 3 a and b, or b and c, etc. No half credit all or nothing. This would not be to awful if you did not have to keep a C in every class or retake it, and if you have to take a class over again you realistically have no option but to drop out. You also have to keep a 3.0 in order to advance into the professional years. This would not be awful in a normal college but at ACP the administrators have said that it is similar to keeping a 4.0 at another school. The difficulty of the work insures there is no true "learning" you cram and then dumb all the info and it's gone, there is no real way to retain the huge quantity of information they aspect you to learn, not that they teach you. There also is relatively nothing to do at the school. The first few weeks of the year you have trips and lots of fun activities but once classes get serious everything stops. If you go to visit you will also notice that they have flag football games, these only happens on days when people are visiting. Ok some positive aspects. The people here are super super nice, including the upperclassmen. Everyone tries to help everyone. Unlike in other schools everyone that is accepted has a spot in the professional years, as long as you meet the requirements. This means that you are not competing with the other students for spots. This is very common at other schools. Albany does have a lot to do also, you have the mall close by, museums, and concerts, the only problem is you will not have time for them.