To be fair, when i was in dental school, we only start doing some dentistry perhaps 3 months before the end of second year. i still remember, I didnt even know what mesial is at that time...Columbia and Uconn dental kids take medical school classes but they are not treated as med students. HSDM kids are meds students the first 1.5 - 2 years. we take the same classes, same exams, same grading, and in the same lecture halls with med kids..there were only 1=2 ethics courses that we did not have to do. we had to go to hospital to interview patients, listen to their heart their lungs, do physical exams on patients just like the med students. Once in a while, we had kids leave dental school to apply to medical school because they found out that they like medicine more.. I did like the medical classes more when i was there..
we had to do random stuffs such as rectal exams on patients to "get" cleared by the medical school to finish second year of the medical school portion. it is not the lack of handskills, it is just that we had to do too much medical school stuffs the first 2 years. HSDM students basically do 4 years of dentistry in 2 or 2.5 years. it used to be a 5 year DMD program at HSDM. hsdm tend to send kids to sister schools such as Columbia, penn, UCLA, UIC.... some schools such as iowa, nebraska or usually the south dont know/ dont have any experience with us...we all match our first time...so it still works out at the end
I would say a few kids in the class of 35 chose HSDm because they want to do big things, saving the world from caries???. The rest just want a guaranteed acceptance to very competitive specialties just like OMFS, endo, ortho...