I would hope you are not serious. So let me get this straight, you are saying you could obverse/shadow a profession for lets say....20-40hrs, and make up your mind that you want to devote your life to it?!?. I DON'T THINK SO!
I guess people who have done extensive amounts of shadowing/helping/actually working with a dentist seeing this from a different light, but yes I am serious. I shadowed for about 25 hours and volunteered for about 80 (I know, more than my recommendation, but I did more because I was having fun), and I have been as certain about this career choice as anything in my life. Of course, everyone is different, etc. etc., but this seemed enough for the four schools to which I was accepted (only one, IU, of which asked anything about my shadowing/volunteering.
If you say "I want to be a dentist" why would any adcom doubt you just because you don't have x number of hours assisting or something? If you've begun shadowing you've probably already done some research into dentistry and thought that you might like to be a dentist, so what would you learn in week 2,3,4,5, or 6 that might make you change your mind? Of course you'll learn to recognize procedures and equipment, so does that mean we should decide upon dentistry based upon our ability to memorize names? You cannot legally drill, extract teeth, do root canals, etc., nor will you learn what it is like to be responsible for a small business without actually owning one. You can learn more about the human interactions involved in dentistry (dentist-patient-staff) over a longer period of time, but all dentist are different and what goes on at the dentist you help will only hold true for that dentist.
This all brings me back to my main point: adcoms do not require hundreds of hours of assisting experience and anything over the required minimum will probably make little difference in their decisions (though it could be enough to put you over the edge, who knows).
You can stop reading now, as below is more or less just a rambling mess.
As for the drive to learn about dentistry, that's why we're trying to get into dental school. Staying late to help dentists, etc. is grand if you have that kind of free time to work as an unpaid dental assistant, but with all the stress put upon being a well-round applicant and the every increasing competitiveness between pre-dents, is it really wise to spend all of your time in a dental office when what you learn will be so minute compared to what you will be required to learn in dental school?
Here's an analogy for you: I've watched and listened to my wife play the piano for hundreds of hours. I know all the physics of the piano, the names of the keys, even how one is made. Unfortunately, I suck at piano, and none of the above things makes me any more competitive for a scholarship to Julliard. If you're good enough at piano, though, you can learn to read music and memorize piano literature after you've been accepted. Think of our prereqs as learning basics of how to play a piano. If you're good enough at the basic sciences, you'll get in. You'll never know if you
really want to be a dentist until you actually are one and get to feel what it's like. That doesn't mean you shouldn't shadow, though, just that you shouldn't spend too much time doing it.
There's another thing I hear a lot (and not just from pre-dents like us), this idea of devoting one's life to something. I will never devote my live to dentistry; that special devotion is reserved for my personal happiness and nothing else. I will devote dentistry to my life and happiness, not the other way around. I've already decided to devote my life to me and my happiness, nothing else, so all the other decisions come pretty easily.
