Are student's assets or liabilities?
What are we motivated by?
And who are we to become?
Last year I applied for a job in one of the largest city pharmacies only to be told that they did not hire students.
I was aware that casual students are more expensive to employ than casual staff, I was aware that students have restricted working hours, I was aware that students make mistakes and I was aware that during exams many students refuse to work.
However I was not prepared for this very young pharmacists reasoning "I cannot get students out of the dispensary."

Two forces motivate students.
Some thrive on the experience and others need the cash.
We have role models that are good, bad and occasionally down right ugly.

It is true, we make mistakes. I know a student who once realizing, under the pharmacists watchful eye, that he was about to dispense Marvelon instead of the prescribed Maxolon comforted himself in the fact that it was "too late for prevention".
Although mistakes are enviable once rectified they become great lessons.

There is a pharmacy so renown in the student community for its lessons that casual students agree to be paid the lesser casual rate so other students can share the experience.

I once worked in a pharmacy whose sister store had a pharmacist whom came in early every Saturday to train his student staff.
I didn't have to work as hard as these students and was given many more shifts in my quieter store but I still became dissatisfied.
I wanted to learn.

I have heard of students who have mentors that become so influential that eventually they purchase the business and morph into a mentor themselves.

As HECS bills and living expenses rise some student are forced to work anywhere, with anyone, for the right price.
The horror of a second year pharmacist left in a white coat behind the dispensary while the pharmacist goes out on a lunch date.
A grade A student who discovered that his role model and family pharmacist was under investigation for selling excessive amounts of pre-amphetamine products.

It was naive of the young pharmacist in the large city store to assume that all pharmacy students are alike.
The right student, in the right business will be an asset.

Do I have my rose colored glasses on?
Am I an idealistic student who does not understand the commercial reality?
The reality is that student cost money to learn and, as the shares in a therapeutic company can turn sour, some students can too.

Those who are taught by the good become the good. Is not the greater liability allowing students to dwindle in the ugly side of pharmacy?