Raghav Sharma
Vanshika Agrawal
Arushi Mahajan
Shalabh Mahajan
Pranav Saxena
Goa Institute of Management
Divya Singhal
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PHARMACAD is a one stop solution for all the pharmacy students planning to pursue their careers or higher education in India. The need was felt as the saturation was observed in the engineering admissions and an increasing trend towards pharmacy admissions. Several students take up pharmacy without any real awareness about the scope and plethora of opportunities in this field. In order to help all these students and guide them in the right/suitable career direction along with an overall knowledge of all possible aspects of the industry, Jigyasa Jain with Pranav Ganatra came up with this venture called PHARMACAD.
The UN’s goal to ensure access to affordable and quality education and subsequently increase number of youths and adults with relevant skills for employment and entrepreneurship is in complete alignment with their aim to provide effective learning environment to all for achieving sustainable development.
All this began somewhere in 2013/14 when she was pursuing her masters in pharmacy when her friend (now the co-founder of PHARMACAD) randomly spoke to her about the need of professional coaching institute for the pharmacy students. Though there were certain small institutes existing already, they operated locally or only for a specific set of students.
The students from remote colleges had no or very little access to these facilities and it ended up creating the impression that “pharmacy has no/little scope.”
They identified this problem and after speaking to a lot of senior professors and students from different colleges she was able to identify some possible solutions and merged them into one by the name PHARMACAD.
Their aim is basically to establish pharmacy as one of the key factors of the healthcare system in India and the sub-subcontinent by providing formal coaching and academic guidance of topmost quality to the students who wish to pursue their higher education or career in India or abroad.
Students in India take up pharmacy as a secondary career option to medical or engineering and most of those who join pharmacy have no real awareness about the spectrum of opportunities due to the lack of dignity of the pharmacists in India. Also there are several competitive exams (GPAT/NIPER/BITS etc) for higher studies and various pharmacy related jobs for which there is no proper guidance for the students.
Pharmacad thus serves as a platform for all these people to see, learn and grow out of the traditional orthodox mind set about pharmacy.
What makes us different from others (local competitors) is the the focus on the overall development of the budding pharmacists and not just working on their grades.
A number of personal experiences were the inspiration for the inception of PHARMACAD.
While she was pursuing her B.Pharm, Jigyasa Jain observed a lot of her batchmates and juniors were dejected as they had no clue about how to prepare for entrance exams or what could be a future career path be. Also because of dearth of any counselling or alumni network, all she could understand was that there is no scope for pharmacy in India.
While she thought otherwise and the growth of Indian Pharma industry would back it, she also felt while pursing Masters that a lot of students took up a Masters but there was no quality research work being produced due to a lack of basic pharmacy knowledge and found it difficult to execute individual research work in the time available. The situation was the same for some of the privileged students who had decided moving out of the country would solve their problems. In both the cases, entrance exams were merely an admission gateway which did not prove the mettle of students in terms of their research knowledge, especially the GRE which is Math and English dominated.
The leaders at PHARMACAD believe in taking one thing at a time. In the last two years since its inception, they have focused on the GPAT Exam which is a nationwide test for masters of pharmacy in the India. The average qualification result for all of India is approximately 10% every year. In the last two years, PHARMACAD has had a conversion of 60% in the first year and 78% in the second. They have also counselled students during their admission processes for higher studies and have been able to guide most of them into the top 10 pharmacy colleges in India. 80% of their students who qualified for the entrance exams in the last two years have been placed in the top 10 ranked pharmacy institutes of our country (According to NIRF Rankings 2018).
The company’s short-term goal is to establish PHARMACAD as a first-choice academy for all pharmacy students for any possible support with respect to coaching/counselling/job placement/training and development etc.
Their long term goal is to work in harmony with the industry to create awareness about the profession, reaching out to the students from remote areas who do not have access to quality education, creating a sense of dignity/pride for the fellow pharmacists in and around the country, developing different job profiles which are non-existing or are practiced in very low numbers in the country (eg; patient counselling), to create a platform for individuals who are passionate about teaching but are not able to take it up as full time career, and to create a sense of independence in the students by enabling them to learn and earn through various academic activities. Most importantly, PHARMACAD wishes to bridge the gap between what is taught in college and what is needed in the industry.
They have already started conducting several guest lectures by industry personnel on topics which are hardly covered in the academic syllabus, thus giving the students an overall view of the different options available in this huge industry.
Over the last 2/3 years the business has grown from 5 students to 40. All the capital has been invested by the founders since the inception. Jigyasa mentioned that "All the teachers were recruited after carefully screening their profiles and taking two rounds of interviews to assess their teaching skills and the content explanation. Since their recruitment, we have had certain activities to assess the consistency of their performance in the form of regular feedback from the students (written/verbal)".
They have also engaged their teaching and non-teaching staff in several self-development activities to promote their retention and ensure 100% effort during each lecture.
PHARMACAD has opened and scaled up a new market of Pharmacy coaching. The idea of PHARMACAD has also encouraged many others to come up with similar start-ups and compete to provide quality education. They also have created several services apart from GPAT coaching in the last two years (i.e., semester coaching, career counselling, and certificate courses for industry linked subjects).
PHARMACAD does not just enlighten students to gain quality education and guidance, but also curates the passion of industrial experts who want to make a difference and bring their practical experiences to the classroom for students to be abreast of the pharmacy world. The platform provides a symbiotic relationship for all who want to learn, share and make a difference.
The relentless effort for shaping young minds in PHARMACAD represents a valuable enterprise in and of itself, given the value of knowledge generated-- even if advances in the application of the research in India is going to take some time.
The business has already started seeing the light at the end of tunnel with some of their students who have filed patents, written books, become scientists, and have topped entrance exams in India.
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Jigyasa Jain, Co-founder
PHARMACAD provides a one stop solution for individual who wishes to make a career in Pharmacy. With well qualified teachers having direct interaction with the industry it is a specialized coaching institute that trains and grooms pharmacy students to face professional entrance exams.