Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

Concentrations & Dual Degrees

Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD)—Direct Entry

Expand Your Expertise & Broaden Career Possibilities

Our concentration and dual degree options allow you to customize your PharmD and build advanced knowledge in a practice area of interest. These opportunities allow you to tailor your education to align with your career goals and help you stand out in a competitive job market.

Enhance your education by pursuing a concentration that complements your core curriculum. A concentration is a focused area of study that includes specific coursework within the standard PharmD curriculum, consisting of two didactic electives and one advanced elective rotation that allows you to apply classroom learning directly in patient care settings, for a total of 12 credits. These credits count towards the required credit total for graduation and do not require additional classes/tuition beyond those already offered as part of the curriculum.

Pain Management & Palliative Care

This concentration prepares you to provide compassionate, evidence-based, and patient-centered pain and symptom management as part of an interprofessional team. Build advanced skills and knowledge in assessing and managing acute pain, chronic pain, and pain related to serious illness. Through focused coursework and hands-on clinical experiences, you will deepen your knowledge of multimodal pain management, opioid stewardship, symptom management, treating patients with co-occurring substance use disorders, and ethical decision-making.

Psychiatric Pharmacy

This concentration enhances your understanding of various psychiatric, neurologic, and substance use disorders and how they are treated. It prepares you to deliver appropriate, evidence-based care for psychiatric and neurological illness and substance use disorders as part of an interprofessional team, and to provide care to persons living with these illnesses across treatment settings.

Veterinary Pharmacy

This concentration builds your knowledge in animal anatomy, physiology, behavior, veterinary pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, compounding laws, and drug literature. You will acquire the skills and training to think critically and apply evidence-based pharmacotherapy to obtain optimum therapeutic outcomes for large, small, and exotic animal patients. You will also build confidence compounding and dispensing animal medications.

Students enrolled in the Doctor of Pharmacy—Direct Entry program at MCPHS are eligible to earn dual degrees in a complementary area of study:

These dual degrees prepare you and give you a competitive edge for fellowships, residencies, jobs in the pharmaceutical industry, and more. They're tailored for those looking to deepen their knowledge of drug development and seek employment beyond the traditional pharmacy setting.

Some dual degrees require eight additional courses beyond the PharmD curriculum: two courses in each of the summers after professional years 1, 2, and 3, and one course in both the fall and spring semesters of professional year 3. The latter two serve as professional electives in the third professional year. Earn two degrees without adding more time to your course of study and enter the workforce two years earlier than if the degrees were earned sequentially.

Summer courses are online and asynchronous.

How to Apply

Choose a dual-degree program during your professional year 1. Here's what to know:

  • Applications open in January of professional year 1 of the Doctor of Pharmacy program
  • The process includes an application and interview with the committee
  • Minimum 3.0 GPA required

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