Flunk-Out Class

by Jean Frank

Pharmacy school was a very small unit. We were located in Foster Hall, and there were about three hundred or so students in the whole school. We started out with 104 in our class. Out of the 104, there were ten girls. When we graduated, there were 64 in the graduating class, six of them girls. Obviously, only ten percent were girls!

We had the feeling in our class that pharmacy students were elite, because we had to have more savvy and more drive than students who lounged over at Norton Union. We were dedicated.

The nice thing was that we had the comradeship of everybody working together. The best way to study was with your friends, but it was not a party. We cross-examined each other with questions and answers. You couldn't get your mother to do it, because your mother didn't know chemical words and terminology. Only another person from the class could do it.

Dr. Swisher was a chemistry teacher who taught Quantative Analysis, which you took your third year. Oh, she was tough. She was like a top sergeant. She made grown men quake. Even veterans of WWII would shiver when they saw her coming. There were boys who came home from Guadalcanal who couldn't face her. It was like a flunk-out class. If you got through her course, you knew you could probably make it in the program.

She left the year I was supposed to take her course. But they had another flunk-out course for us: College Physics. When you got into that you were lost. We didn't see any purpose for pharmacists to take it, because it would never be utilized, whereas biology and chemistry would. But it cut the class size from 104 to 64. We thought it was an attempt to control the number of new pharmacists entering the profession.