<p>Hello, my name is Austin and I am in my third year of undergraduate studies, majoring in biology. Whats unique about my situation is that I am in an accelerated 5-Year P.A. program where I do 3 years of undergrad and 2 years of P.A. school. I have a 3.95 GPA and got a 312 on my GRE. I am already accepted to P.A. school, but am now contemplating whether I should go to dental school instead. I have a lot of friends that are going to dental school next year, which prompted me to consider dental school. I feel as though the lifestyle of a dentist far surpass that of a P.A. and it would only take me an additional 2-3 years of schooling. I have an equal interest in both medicine and dentistry, which makes this a difficult decision. Any advice or input would be greatly appreciated. </p>
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This question really belongs in the Dental School forum. Are you talking salary or job satisfaction? If it is salary, a PA makes about 90K a year vs. a dentist’s 150K. (Median, according to BLS) But if you go to dental school for 3 additional years you have paid tuition and lost 3 years of potential salary. Dental School tuition and fees can easily top 80K/year not counting living expenses. So there is some math to be done; that could put you in the hole for more than 500K. If you think that the job satisfaction of a dentist “far surpasses” that of a PA, though, then that might be what should guide your choice, because you are talking about a career not a summer job. Best wishes.</p>
<p>Thanks for your input. I re-posted this in the Dental School forum. </p>
<p>Apparently you entered an accelerated 5-year program, so you must have been planning to be a PA before now. Were you happy with that choice or did you just kind of pick it because it sounded good/lucrative/stable?</p>
<p>And you said that you are now considering dental school because a lot of your friends are going. Frankly, that’s not really a good reason to change your career plans. It’s one thing if your friends made you consider dental school more closely and you developed a personal interest in it, but you must consider carefully to divine whether this is actually the case.</p>
<p>AS @snarlatron already pointed out, dentists can make twice as much as physician’s assistant - or more than that. But the lifestyle is different. PAs are supervised by physicians; most likely, you would be employed by a hospital or a doctor’s office. You could potentially work 9-5 hours if you worked in a doctor’s office; at the hospital, you could work any kind of hours. PAs mostly do the primary care kinds of tasks that physicians used to spend most of their time doing before they started increasingly specializing. A lot of PAs are also being hired by urban clinics, where they do most of the day to day practice of medicine - they may only be “supervised” in the sense that a physician comes on site once a week or so.</p>
<p>Dentists can also specialize in a variety of fields, but most general dentists have their own practice and work regular office hours (9 to 5). You could specialize in orthodontics and do braces and such; you could go into cosmetic dentistry.</p>
<p>I don’t know what you mean by lifestyle. Work-wise, it seems like dentists and PAs do very similar kind of work - dentists work on teeth, of course, but it’s mostly being on your feet in an office interacting with patients 8 hours a day. Dentists may seem to have a better non-work lifestyle because they get paid more, if that’s what you mean - so yeah, they can afford a different caliber of things than PAs can. But $70K is still a very good amount of money; in most places, that would make your family very comfortable, especially if you had a partner who earned around the same amount.</p>