hey it's dr amanda with street smile solutions street smile solutions.com and today i wanted to
talk to you actually i want to answer a question that i get a lot of questions from a lot of dental
students medical students college students about going into the field of dentistry going into the
field of orthodontics so i'm gonna go ahead and just address all of that um tips tricks what to
do what not to do what i would do different if i had to do it all over again so granted i finished
college in 1996 we didn't even really have barely have internet back then we barely had email
we definitely didn't have social media things were really really really different than they
are now so everything's different um what would i do different first of all i was really dumb
no one gave me the right advice um i mean maybe i didn't know i think now with all the forums and
message boards you can get a lot of really good advice good and bad i had no one really to ask
questions to i was interested in medicine and the idea of going into medicine but i was always also
very interested in dentistry the part of dentistry i liked was the aesthetic part not the drill and
fail part at all i knew that was not what i wanted to do so stupid me did something dumb that i would
never recommend anyone does i applied to both dental and medical school so i took the mcat
did pretty good probably could have gotten in um took the dat did really well on that um
definitely knew i could pretty much get in anywhere with the dat scores i took both tests
they're very different tests so you know there's some overlap but you have to really the dat has
a perceptual section um and it has a few other sections that the ncat doesn't have and there's
a lot of sections that are on the d80 i think the dlt is like way easier it's very similar to the
gre actually except for the perceptual section which was something i did really well on so
um i felt pretty good applying don't apply to both you will get 100 medical schools don't care
but you'll get 100 blackballed by the deep by the dental schools if and when they find out and they
i think now it's even easier to find out they asked me straight out in a few applications and i
i was told that if they find out and you lie you'll be blackballed permanently
from dental school so i was honest i just was like i'm interested in both
just applying see how it goes big no no never do that i ended up getting black belt from almost
every school even though by far i had the grades and scores to get in hands down it would have
i would have gotten it everywhere and probably gotten way better package you know financial aid
package had i not done that so in hindsight and that's the issue if you apply to medical school
don't get in apply to dental school the next year you're still going to be blackballed
so you really need to think hard because they will find out um they're gonna they do not want people
who are using dentistry as a second career because they didn't get into medicine so my suggestion is
you really sit down um you can take the mcat see how you do if you didn't score like an amazing
score like a very very good score don't apply just saying you know what this isn't going to happen
i'm going to do dental school and then you can say you never apply so that would be my suggestion
if you want to give it a shot i think for a lot of people i mean medical school is really
competitive getting too personally i'm glad i didn't go now that i think about it because
you know it is so incredibly not only competitive to get into but once you're in um it's cutthroat i
mean dental school is not that cutthroat and i can go over that later um i really really enjoyed it
actually like it was significantly so easy for me in relative to college um i thought and i went to
the number one dental school ucsf in the world basically so they were super brilliant people
i just thought dental school was super easy so um medical school also you know you're gonna go
everyone does a residency everyone has to match obviously the gunners are going to do surgery
and certain derm certain types of specialties the lower level students are going to do primary care
you know for me i mean ultimately i was like do i really want and you gotta think about the quality
of your life too you're gonna go to residency for three to seven three to ten years with fellowship
i mean you're going to be in school bare minimum to your 31 if you go straight
maybe okay for a female but if you want to have a family things are going to get really different
and you're going to have crazy student loans um you're barely going to see your kids because
you're going to have to be working unless you're independently wealthy um it's going to really
change the quality of your life and as a female i think you really need to think about these are
things i didn't think about you need to think about what's your plan what's your vision do
you see yourself getting married having kids how invested do you want to be in your kids lives
i mean for me i did go on to orthodontic residency that's a whole other story we'll
get into that in a few minutes um fascinating loved it um didn't graduate until i was 30
you know and i went straight so if you go boom boom straight you know that's that you know
you will be borrowing money and dental residency dental residency is rarely paid you know so for
most of them some arms wasn't bad it was one of the most affordable i think i had to pay
tuition the first year then after that i only had to borrow room and board and i think the third
year they paid us like eight thousand dollars but you still had to borrow so maybe i borrowed like
60 70 80 000 for residency for three years not bad some people paid borrow 200 000 and i maybe
had 150 000 in student loans from undergrad which is not bad so i mean 200 000 student loans is not
bad for seven years it's not that at all i'm still paying mine off but it's a 1.25 percent interest
rate so i don't care so i'm in no hurry to pay that off i think i've got another five years of
it but um anyways things to think about how do you see the quality of your life obviously if you're a
dude it's probably less of an issue than if you're a female um residency is tough dental school is
still stuff you're going to be very busy you're not going to have time to have kids it's not the
right thing to do i think that's wrong there were some people that had kids in dental school and in
residency they never saw their kids i think that's wrong i wouldn't do that but that was
just a conscious decision i made um but anyways so dental school was great i really loved my school
like really really love my school ucsf i would totally recommend it i just thought it was such
it was it's a public school you know so it's a lot of california residents it's very hard
to get in out of state i was a california resident you have to really be focused in college if you're
not staying in your state of residency or state of where you're from you know if you're from oklahoma
and you don't go to college in oklahoma you need to make sure you keep your residency even when
you go off to college that means you shouldn't be buying a car in the other location driver's
license everything should be still based in your home state because you're going to lose your
residency and that's really helps to make things way more affordable so things to keep in mind even
if you're only 18 17 years old if you are thinking about doing post graduate professional school
you know you want to keep your residency because that's going to be your most affordable way is to
do in-state wherever you're in-state is so things to think about i remember i had to drive my car
from california to missouri in order to keep it in state yeah so um what else yeah loved ucsf um
really nice people really really diverse friendly fun really smart people great facilities really
not negative energy at all which to me is huge um i pick colleges it sounds kind of you know really
cloudy but i mean i i like to feel the energy of people how positive people are are they willing
to help you if you have a problem um i really felt like after hearing a lot of other people's dental
school stories i really really liked my school and like if you had i think if you polled our students
everyone would have said that they loved it they really really loved the teachers the program
directors they really went out of their way to make sure you were if you had issues or concerns
that you were taken care of um that they created a nurturing place for you to learn um i didn't feel
that threat that a lot of people have in dental school there are a lot of dental schools that
you go to where um ours was i don't know if it's still this way but ours was done with by rvu's
relative value units um you had like a minimum threshold you had to get on certain procedures
in third and fourth year like you had to do at least one bridge at least one or two endos
at least one or two dentures i can't remember what they were but then regardless you had to create
you had to do rvus so you had to get your points basically so however you got your points you got
it so if you were someone that really liked to do crowns you could do a lot of crowns right you
could do a lot of cosmetic fillings you could do a lot of onlays you get your points one of many
different ways sometimes you have very little control as to what walks into your lap you know
and you can trade patients and stuff like that but the idea took a lot of stress away because
i wasn't constantly looking for certain things it was really easy to get the minimum requirements
our views you can get from a variety of different ways i just felt like there was very little stress
there was always an abundance of patients we had night clinic which was started in second
year to really serve the community i love doing that we got to do rotations and externships um
we went to the indian health reservation spent a month you know off site i think they still do a
lot of that it started with our year i loved it it was so fun to get to do some traveling and really
doing a lot of hands-on work so anyways dental school was great didn't borrow that much money
love living in san francisco i love my school so hoping to have an opportunity to give back there
um residency was a different story i love ortho um it's hard you know to get into a good residency
program especially the top residency programs like ortho os endo even pito is harder to get into now
very competitive we used a match system which was very similar to if you've done sorority rush
it's very similar you know system where you apply then you go interview in a very short
period of time you're going to rank your schools they're going to rank you and then on a certain
day at a certain time boom you get an email and that's where you're going no no changes so um
it was really fun definitely the match system um i ended up going to university of connecticut which
i think was my second choice now i'm saying that it wasn't my first choice i'm not gonna say what
my first choice was but you know in hindsight i think it was a good fit um for me i was looking
for again positive karma um you're with a small group of people usually four or five residents
per class you know so that's a grand total like around 15 people you want people that you're going
to get along with you don't want bullies or mean people so i really really loved my co-residence
i really picked the program for that um for the co-residence and was nice facilities um
i loved the location it was someplace new it wasn't that expensive so it worked for me
um it's definitely a big move from san francisco to connecticut i'd never lived there before but
i wanted to try something different um so it was cool um what i didn't realize
is that there was going to be a lot of hazing not from the other residents but from
some of the members of the faculty like bad hazing which i think is extremely illegal at this point
maybe what you could get away with you know 20 years ago you can't get away with now but terrible
hazing and if i told you some of the stuff that they made us do which was not even related to
dentistry in order to stay in the program you'd be appalled so most for the most part i mean i
refused to do a lot of the stuff i was told i had to do because it had nothing to do with dentistry
you know you can't make me walk your dog or clean your rain gutters or hang up your christmas lights
or babysit your kid just because i'm a resident i'm not your slave so i hate to use that word but
basically that's the way we were treated um being forced to do things that weren't even related to
what we were doing just to keep our spot in the program so that's not acceptable so i didn't do
it so as a result i didn't get as much funding or grants that like a lot of other people in my
program did so really the more you kiss that ass the more money you got so i was at the bottom of
the barrel the black sheep whatever we were all kind of sorted there were people that were white
sheep black sheep it was regularly said you know so i was like oh i'm not doing that i'm here to
learn you know i'm gonna do what i need to do to get my to see as many patients to do the program
but i'm not gonna do stuff outside the program you know to be somebody's lackey so there's a
lot of garbage that goes on um there's a lot of hazing there's also hazing in medical residency so
um i didn't know about that i mean certainly during the rush portion where you're interviewing
you know everyone's putting on their best smile you know like trying to get the best possible
residence because it's not good for your program if you don't get good residents right so we were
told we could not mention that at all so i always felt kind of bad when we were on the other side
but you know i knew everyone would get through it eventually but it wasn't fun those three years
were the worst three years of my life terrible awful and i'm sure my co-residents will see it
and a lot of people have spoken out but it's not okay to harass people for the color of their skin
for how they do their hair it's not okay to make fun of people's color of their ethnicity to make
racial jokes um certainly there was a lot of that and you know that's not acceptable it
really really hurts people you know permanently when you treat people like that so i mean just
pick your residents i mean i i really hope that some of these dental schools will clean house
on some of these really toxic program directors because that's just wrong to treat people like
that and to basically abuse and haze people is what goes on in residencies all the time so
if i had to do it again would i specialize probably not so it was miserable you know but and
you can do everything and learn everything without having to go to a residency so for all you who
are thinking about specializing why i don't see the point so anyways hopefully this was helpful
if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me straightsmilesolutions.com thanks