ok guys, ive decided to do pharmacy, but now i have another question...
so i sat the STAT test, and UAC sent me a letter a few weeks ago telling me my score of 168. ive also got higher than the required ATAR and put pharmacy as my first uac preference. now what do i do? especially with the STAT test, like how am i supposed to link it with the pharmacy preference? or do i not have to?
how big is the pharmacy workload compared to other degrees such as science, humanities, commerce, psychology, etc.? how many hours of classes per week?
Well B.Sc. and B.Pharm. degrees are quite different from your humanities courses like Psyc etc. The normal structure for a Unit of Study in a B.Sc. or B.Pharm. is Lecture/Tutorial/Lab. Usually 2-3 lectures per week (1h each), maybe a 2hr workshop/tutorial and then a 3hr (can be up to 5hrs) practical/lab class.
In first year pharmacy, in my 1st semester subjects, only CHEM1611 and BIOL1003 had practicals. Your pharmacy units don't have practicals in 1st semester (PHAR1811 and PHAR1812). But in Semester 2, 3 out of the 4 subjects have practicals (MBLG1001, CHEM1612, PHAR1822). From first year experience, I can say that pharmacy has a pretty hectic timetable - my first semester was a 4 day week with fridays off (which was lucky), and second semester was 5 days, but early finishes (around 12pm). I had around 27 contact hours per week (i.e. class hours). B.Sc. is pretty much the same.. if not worse. I hear Med Science students have a more hectic timetable than Pharm students.
In comparison to the humanities (commerce, psyc etc.), Science/Pharmacy courses are more hectic and have more classes. You can probably do way with a 15ish hour week in a humanities course, because all you would probably have, on average, is 2x1hr lectures and a 1hr tutorial per week , per unit of study.
One word of advice, make sure you call up UAC a couple of times before offers come out to make sure that they have your STAT results linked to your application. I called them up to confirm one time, they said its there. And then I called again just before offers and said there was no STAT results attached, and said they would do it for me then - so be careful, UAC can be a bit dodgy with that. I know someone who didn't get an offer for Pharmacy last year because their STAT results weren't attached to their UAC Record on the database.