Finding a Location / Turning Down Local Offer

[David1991]

This might not be the best place for this, but maybe some people can offer insight.

I am going into my 3rd year of dental school and been in clinic for about a month now. I have a good relationship with my current dentist back home (a few states away) and for a while now he has talked about me working there. More recently, he has told me that he has his eye on me working there after my GPR.

I like him a lot, the practice is apparently very successful and well run, the whole office is friendly. However, I do not think I want to live in my home state forever, let alone my hometown. The area isn't bad but it's not great and I want to branch out. The taxes there are some of the worst in the country, the weather is not great, and both my long term girlfriend (very set on marriage) and I have previously talked about not wanting to live there.

But it's hard to turn it down when I have a successful dentist I know and trust offering me $500+/day to start and only room to grow from there and probably eventually buy the practice.

Ideally I would move somewhere warmer and with a lower cost of living, something like North Carolina. But what does everyone do who doesn't have these types of connections to begin with? Would I be foolish to give up such an opportunity or is it not really that hard to find a practice to start working at wherever one wants to live? I am not even set on where I do want to live, I just know that if I take this offer I will always wonder if I just took the easy option even though in the back of my mind I knew it wasn't what I wanted location wise. I would like to find a nice suburban area with good job opportunities, low cost of living, and nice weather, ideally on the east coast. My parents have mentioned living in a nearby state with lower costs of living, but then I still have to deal with the weather and the commute would be about 40min each way, more than I'd prefer to deal with every day there and back.

Thoughts/opinions?

Thanks a lot

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[ButlerCard]

I'm only a student so what I say might be worthless still but I don't want to go home either so I know your sentiments. But from what I've gathered associates should be looking for 500-700 starting pay. That obviously depends where you live and how things at the practice are but I say that implying that him offering you 500 a day isn't good by any means. It's the average. In my opinion, why go work for the pay that you would get anywhere else, and possibly lower pay than many places, to live in a place you don't actually want to live in? I left town for college and I got even farther away for dental school. People I knew from high school went to the college in town or others from college went back to work in town "just for a year or two then I'm leaving". They're all there. Living in their parents neighborhoods hanging out with their high school friends. It comes down to what kind of life you want. I want nothing to do with where I am from. It's Indiana! Ive had my flat landscapes and cornfields. Moving on. Do what you wanna do and be where you wanna be. Also keep in mind that 500$ a day isn't an amazing offer. It's offer that is made everywhere as a minimum

 

[David1991]

Good post, thanks for the reply. That is a good point and what you said about "just for a year or two" is spot on and one of my major concerns. My parents and others have said something along the lines of "you could work there for a few years to learn how the operation works" but the dentist himself has told me how hard it was to get patients to trust him at first (as in they didn't want to switch over from the former owner) so I just cannot imagine spending 3 years getting this large patient base, getting a home, getting married there and having my wife have a professional job there, and then all of a sudden 3-4 years into it saying "OK, that's it, I'm ready to move"...it seems incredibly unlikely that I would move at that point. Otherwise I would start there, but I feel like I will become even more stuck.

I'm wondering what do people do then who don't have connections already....like say I do move to NC, do I just look around trying to find dentists who are looking for an associate and hope he is a good fit? I have heard of people getting really screwed over this way becoming the older dentists' bitch basically or somehow getting taken advantage of financially.