For many students, choosing a university course is driven by passion, family influence or academic strength. For entrepreneur and Konnected Minds host Derrick Abaitey, however, the decision came down to one question: Which career would give him the best chance at financial freedom?
Speaking on The Career Trail on Joy Learning TV and Joy News, Abaitey revealed that pharmacy was not his first choice.
He had considered studying Information Technology (IT), business and pharmacy before making a decision.
“I was finding it difficult to choose between pharmacy, IT and business,” he said.
His academic performance after his first two years of college only made the decision more complicated.
“My grades were not good enough, and it almost made sense that I should just go to university and study a course based on the subjects I had done well in. I did terrible at science, so IT or business seemed like the obvious choices,” he recalled.
But instead of settling for the easier path, Abaitey began researching the career prospects of each option.
“Through my research, I figured out that IT or business wouldn’t guarantee me a job the way I was thinking about it at the time,” he shared.
He then drew inspiration from someone who had influenced him since childhood, his stepfather, who made a living selling agrochemicals.
“I looked up to my stepfather so much, and he was a chemical seller. To me, the next level of that was becoming a pharmacist,” he noted.
Determined to make an informed decision, Abaitey researched the earning potential of pharmacists across different sectors.
“I checked how much pharmacists were paid and realised there were three sectors. The highest-paid was industry, followed by community pharmacy, while hospital pharmacists earned the least. I said to myself, ‘That’s where I’m going,'” he revealed.
With that goal in mind, he enrolled to study pharmacy, despite knowing the programme would be demanding.
The journey, however, was far from easy.
Abaitey admitted that science did not come naturally to him, and he struggled throughout his time at university. At one point in his third year, he found himself fighting to stay on the programme after repeatedly struggling with a mathematics-related course.
“I’m terrible at maths. I had one final chance to pass the exam. If I didn’t, they would kick me out of the university,” he highlighted.
Despite the setbacks, Abaitey remained convinced that earning a pharmacy degree would change the course of his life and therefore soldiered on.
“I knew I had to go through it because this was going to be my financial breakthrough,” he emphasized.
Looking back, he believes choosing pharmacy was one of the most important decisions he ever made, not because it was easy, but because it gave him the opportunity to build the future he had envisioned.
