I am thinking about becoming a dentist. Would it be possible for me to take time off every summer to be a stay at home mother while my children are off from school? Thank you!
Is it possible for a woman dentist to take 3 months off from work every year?
- Thread starter Buppy99
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Yes, you should be able to do that if you work as an associate dentist for someone else and you make prior arrangements for it. I think employers might prefer someone who can work year-round, though. A better plan might be to work 3/days a week or something. It would be harder to run your own practice when you're not available for 3 months, but I assume you could hire someone to work in your place? Not sure...
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hellz yeah, u do whatever u want. Whos gonna fire u? Yourself? That would just be weird....
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Possible, sure, especially if you own your own practice of course. Good for business? No.
You will lose a lot of patients this way if its your own practice. Part of operating a great practice is your relationship with your patients. Only working 3/4th of the year doesn't work towards this relationship, as they'll have to be referred to a different dentist/stranger for the remaining 1/4th. If you're working for someone else, they may also not want someone who would only be there for 3/4th of the year when they can find others who will be there year round.
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Sure you can choose not to work 3 months out of the year. When I worked doing nursing home dentistry, I only worked when I could fit assignments into my schedule. Relationship building with patients was such a non-issue at that job. 50% of the time the patient population has some sort of dementia and doesn't even know who you are. But they have a mouth full of abscessed root tips so they do need a dentist. So if you find a flexible job like that, you can easily choose when to work and when to stay with your kids.
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3 months off the job, you can really lose your touch, i don't think that's good in the profession
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A much more viable option for both your patients and your future business/employability opportunities would be to work say 3 days a week year round than be able to take each and every summer off.
While having an entire summer off is desireable as a parent, many, many of those same parents also want to get their kids for dental work (if they need it) during those same summer months. And while in some offices, there may be some months that are traditionally slighty slower than others (business wise) there's never really a downtime in dentistry.
As an employer, if I had a person applying for a job as an associate and they told me that they wanted to take every summer off, I'd very likely NOT hire them, since you're spending the other 9 months a year to BUILD a patient base, just to "ignore" them for 3 months??? Not a good business model.
While having an entire summer off is desireable as a parent, many, many of those same parents also want to get their kids for dental work (if they need it) during those same summer months. And while in some offices, there may be some months that are traditionally slighty slower than others (business wise) there's never really a downtime in dentistry.
As an employer, if I had a person applying for a job as an associate and they told me that they wanted to take every summer off, I'd very likely NOT hire them, since you're spending the other 9 months a year to BUILD a patient base, just to "ignore" them for 3 months??? Not a good business model.
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Consider that if you own your own practice, your expenses will be year-round, regardless of whether or not you are working. For those three months that you don't bill, you will still need to pay lease, payroll, etc. That can be thousands of dollars per week.
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sounds like you'd be happier as a teacher. Why are you REALLY going into dentistry? There are a few guys/gals who work per diem to fill in for other dentists but if you're going to take the risk of dropping 300K and servicing that debt then you better have a way of making some money. Anyone who goes into dentistry to have a part time gig is delusional unless you got someone paying your bills.
