Ambition; it can be perceived as either a blessing or a burden. Smart? Amibition is a logical extension to match your capabilities to your career. No point in having a person with an IQ of 160 working as a cashier. Hard worker? Ambition could be just your own way of compensating for the intelligence you think you possess.
Ambition and the pursuit of the holy grail milk-and-honey degrees, Medicine and Dentistry, go hand in hand. Think of all those wise-ass over achievers from your Year 12 class who got high ATAR marks; what degrees did they go on to? Most of those that weren't robotic memory recall machines went on to the health sciences, Bachelor of Medicine/Surgery, Dentistry. Or they went to law or commerce, but lets not go there.
Those of us who didn't find our footing in Year 12 just followed on blindly, hoping that whatever path we chose next would lead us onto our next passion. Having been to a semi-private high school, most of my cohort who had no idea what was next took a gap year Or did nothing. Not having the financial backing to fuel a year of alcohol-driven apathy, I enrolled into a Bachelor of Science. I hated Science, even Year 12 Chemistry and Biology, much preferring mathematics. But I enrolled anyway.
I coasted through first year Uni; I didn't detest my classes but didn't find anything especially enticing either. Standard first year Bio, Chem and Statistics; the former which was my best subject despite having been taught by a constantly inebriated Soviet statistician.
And then 2nd year started.
I picked all my 2nd year subjects a day before the enrolment was due. I was a bit nervous; nothing in first year inspired me! Chemistry was fun, but a bit dry for my tastes. Stats was challenging and intellectually stimulating, but there was no passion. The only thing that didn't shock me into a procrastinatory-induced coma was biology, more specifically, Human biology.
It wasn't until the end of 2nd year, once I had completed all my Physiology and Biochemistry units, that I started to really enjoy the study of the health sciences. Logically, it wasn't too long after this that I started to think of a career in the clinical aspects of health care as an appropriate profession. But then again, research appealed to me too. Hence, before closing the door and committing to a life-time of helping people, I needed to see whether research was the golden goose that I never groomed. I declined an offer for medicine for 2012 entry (financial reasons, but the aforementioned quagmire helped my reasoning) to do a year of honours in biochemistry.
With less than 3 weeks to my thesis submission, I can honestly say that research isn't for me. Maybe in the future I can take a break for a year or two conducting some clinical research, but in terms of the long haul, I don't see it. Research takes as much dedication as medicine or dentistry, if not more. You don't get the recognition, the financial renumeration or the security; if you think research is safe field, wait until you watch a bunch of 35-40 year olds pulling all nighters on a diet of mi-goreng and redbull to finalize a research grant.
Back to the plot.
A few posts ago, I reasoned that dentistry for me wasn't a good fit since I never had a firm desire to do dentistry. But now that I think about it even more, medicine wasn't something I desired neither; my desire was to work in a field to help people. The more I think about my future, the more I think that declining an offer that I have for an offer I may or may not get next year that hinges on my performance on a high-stakes exam where I'll be competing against the creme-de-la-creme of the tertiary population is a ridiculous notion. My ambition from 2nd Year Undergrad onwards to work towards a profession where I could help people wasn't set in stone for med, and I am sorry to say the prestige and elitism associated with medicine probably clouded this, making me doubt whether a potentially life-changing offer for dentistry is worth the juice.
Hence the title of this post, I am once again changing my mind and am favouring accepting my offer for the post-graduate dental medicine course.
A realization I came to after year in the lab is, I need a job where I can work with my hands. If I want to pursue a surgical career, what better way to train my dexterous fingers than drilling tiny holes in peoples mouths?
Also, one particular field of surgery that ALWAYS rubbed me the right way, was Oral Maxillofacial Surgery, or OMS. OMS surgeons are surgeons that specialize in the head, neck and jaw and the one thing that always appealed to me about OMS is that there is tremendous heterogeneity in the types of cases you are qualified to treat. One day you could get someone with a congential face or cleft palate defect, the next day you could get someone with a metastasized tumour on their jaw which needs to be removed and reconstructed. Pretty awesome right?
That's the juice, now here's the squeeze.
Qualified OMS' hold both Dental AND Medical degrees; furthermore, to be inducted into the rigorous minimum 4-year training program with the Royal Australiasian College of Dental Surgeons (RACDS, www.racds.org), you need to have be registered as a dentist, a medical practitioner, have completed a year of internship AND have completed a year of general surgery. And even then, competition to get in is fierce!
I'm not saying that I'll be one of the select few who be allowed to garnish their John hancock with an FRACDS (OMS), but its something to work toward. Who knows, I might come to love dentistry and might not feel the need to progress to a specialty!
Either way, I'm tired and I need to rest. Any by rest, I mean 'read more journal articles'.
Au Revoir,
MTC
Ps. I know much of this post was already said in previous posts; if you picked up on this then all I can suggest is:
(1) Stop living in the past
(2) Stop reading pointless blogs about some narcissistic loser indulging in his masturbatory fulfillment to savour every precious thought that enters his head.
You're better than that.
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