You're asking for advice from the same people you may be putting down. You're not setting yourself up for success by expressing that you found a task that many on this forum find/found difficult to accomplish (scoring well on the DAT and gaining acceptance into dental school) to be a joke. Whether or not you meant to come off this way is unknown to me. I find it hard to believe that you couldn't even score a semi decent score on the MCAT (I'm assuming this based on the fact that you couldn't gain acceptance into a single medical school) yet managed to find the DAT to be a walk in the park.
How old are you? If you're not a troll and your question is genuine then this information may help others answer your question.
If you're really a third year dental student then I'm guessing that you are aware of the different dental specialties that exist. However, most of them require you to look in the oral cavity at one point or another. If you're looking for an "unusual field in dentistry" then you're most likely hunting for one of those rare positions that there aren't too many of. It doesn't seem very smart to finish dental school and limit yourself to those opportunities alone.
You claim that the only reason you didn't leave dental school was so that you could have a backup plan to make six figures and pay off your loans. If you didn't like dental school from day 1 why didn't you just leave right away? This way you could have minimized your financial burden and you wouldn't need a job that pays six figures to pay off your six figure debt all while doing something you hate.
If you performed so poorly on the MCAT then what guarantee do you have that you will end up in the ICU given that you have to take multiple exams that are most likely more difficult than the MCAT. Not all physicians are taking "people off death's door" so if you don't get into your area of choice you may be providing services that you may not see as being valuable or important.
Lastly, you could attend a six-year oral and maxillofacial surgery program and receive your MD and then try to be an ICU doc (not sure how realistic or possible this is) but there are several challenges:
1. You would be old as dirt before you would be working as an ICU doc
2. You would have to look in people's mouth for a LOOONG time before being able to do what you want to do
3. You would have to attend a 6-year program oral maxillofacial program and essentially gain acceptance into a medical school but I doubt you are smart enough given that you weren't able to accomplish this in the past.
By the way, if you are still dating that girlfriend of your, either grow a spine or dump her as I don't think she's helping you "figure out what you are going to do with the rest of your life".
Of course I didn't mean to come off that way. Why would I want to insult the people I am appealing for help?? I know that many found that scoring well on the DAT was difficult, it would have been hard for me too if I hadn't just studied for months and months on end for the MCAT. They are two extremely different tests. The DAT asks questions over a lot of different things that are straight up. The MCAT tests on a more narrow range of topics but asks the questions in paragraph form. It is literally the only test I have ever taken that has done that. Not even the USMLE I and II are set up the same way as the MCAT.
I'm obviously not a troll... I have a lot better things to do than to get on studentdoctor.net during the middle of finals week if I wasn't extremely bothered by what I am asking.
Yes, I am aware of all the recognized dental specialities but I am looking for the one's that are not recognized and more rare. I have heard things about prosth specialities that revolve around artificial eyes, ears, noses etc. But then I found out that a plastic surgeon places those, the prosthodontist makes them. If you know of any rare fields, I would really love to hear them.
I didn't leave dental school right away because I was hoping that it would grow on me and that I would like it. I talked to a lot of advisors and faculty and they all said that they didn't like it to begin with but once they got into clinic (our third year in dental school), they really took a liking to it because they were working with real people. I talked to other students in the school and they said the exact same thing. Being a dentist is probably the best job you can have for all the obvious reasons but you have to at the very least like it. I was hoping I would like it once I got into clinic but I have ended up disliking it even more.
The MCAT is a completely different test than the boards tests for medical school. I know med students who did poorly (not as bad as I did) on the MCAT and did extremely well on their boards. It isn't too difficult to get into the critical care field because there are a ton of avenues to do that. You can go into emergency medicine, peds, internal medicine etc and they all have a path to intensive care and internal medicine and peds are far from the most competitive specialties to match. I do think that I would like most fields of medicine more than dentistry. This isn't a knock on the dental field because lots of people like that, but a lot of the dental field deals with cosmetics and cavities (most of which are contained to the mouth). Based on the clinic at our school, most dental procedures are elective - even cavities. I would really like to do something that is important to keep the person alive longer which is what most medical fields do.
And yea the same type of challenges to going the MD route via OMFS that you have thought of are the one's I have encountered when talking to people. And once in a 6 year OMFS, I have heard it is extremely difficult if not impossible to match to a different residency.
Haha yes, that girl is loooong gone.
Lastly, unlike
@bobtomatoes I wasn't trying to offend or insult anyone. I should have worded my initial question slightly differently (not much) but I don't understand why it seems like dentists are so touchy when compared to docs.
