Hi All,
I have been gearing myself to take the DAT and apply to Dental School, but I am know considering Med School, but I am not sure if it is a Medical School requirement to shadow a Doctor or do some sort of Medical work. I know that most Dental schools require X hours of shadowing a Dentist.(Which I have). Can someone please let me know.
Thanks
It's not a written requirement, per se, but you should probably consider it to be one, because nobody is going to get into med school without some firsthand exposure to the medical profession. Basically they want some clinical exposure. Medicine is one of those careers that you cannot go into blind because the route is long and expensive and few off-ramps into other fields. You either pick right, or you are stuck, and if you feel stuck, you make a lousy doctor. So yes, to apply to med school these days, you'd better be able to say you did some significant shadowing or hospital volunteering or some hospital job/EMT, etc. where you had some semblance of patient contact. Not just for the adcoms' requirements, but for yourself as well. Good standards that have been floated around SDN to gauge how good a clinical experience is, are that you have to be in a position to "smell the patient" or "have a substantial chance of getting thrown up on". You want to interact with the patient, and see how the doctors interact with the patients and each other. Because that will give you some small window into what doctors actually do. Don't rely on family members or TV show depictions.
But I caution you that medicine and dentistry aren't that similar, and it's a big mistake to make career decisions purely based on perceived salary or the prestige of being able to call yourself doctor, etc. You have to actually like it, find it interesting on a regular basis. Which is why medicine "forces" you to get some clinical exposure. If you don't enjoy working with patients, you are going to hate the later years of med school and all of residency and beyond. It's a career that really, truly, is not for everyone. So figure out what you want to do first, and then decide if it's worth pursuing. Don't shoot out apps to medicine, dentistry, etc, etc and see what pans out. That's a lousy way to pick a career and pretty much dooms you into something that's a bad fit. And once you start, it's very hard to change because the years between credentials are long and expensive.
