The Oath

So today I went out to the State Capitol of Oklahoma to check out some places that I might be able to take my oath for the Air Force HPSP. My recruiter told me I just have to have a place with an American flag and an Air Force Officer (which he's going to work out for me) so I wanted some place neat and memorable and I think the State Capitol building would be really neat.

I've been looking into the Commissioned Officer Training material a bit and I'm hopeful that my schedule will work out to allow me to go to COT this summer (May-June). I'd like to get that under my belt before dental school so I don't have it looming at the end of my 4 years, although I've heard it's just fine either way.

Once COT gets closer, I'll be creating and updating the COT page. I've found lots of great information on the internet but it seems to be scattered in several locations. Hopefully when it's all said and done I'll have lots of great first hand experience information to pass along to those looking at the HPSP scholarship or COT in general.

Since I haven't mentioned it yet, I'll talk about what I'm doing this 'semester' since I'm not in school.

I currently work as a high school math and chemistry tutor for a few kids in the area. My dad is friends with a lady who started her own tutoring company a few years ago and had told my dad she was looking for a new tutor. Lucky me! I was looking at the possibility of waiting tables (again...) and I'm much happier with this job. It's a shame that my favorite job to this point in my life is a job that will only last a few more months but all good things must come to an end.

I'm off... hopefully I'll get some time to work on these pages quite a bit this week!

The good old college days

College was (as it is for most) a time of immense change. As I left off in my earlier post, I left high school thinking I wanted to be an architect and came into college thinking maybe an architect, engineer, or doctor. All of them sounded like quite lofty goals, and I had no idea what was coming my way...

Freshman year, my first class (ever) was engineering calculus. About 30 minutes of sitting in that class scared the heck out of me and I decided to drop it and just forget engineering. Seriously... I dropped my first college class ever. Once again, math was my barrier and I wasn't willing to jump over it. So I switched into thinking about medicine, my other idea when I came into college.

That first semester, I also took a class called "Intro to Health Professions", which is what really turned me from medicine to dentistry. I heard a dentist come in and talk about how he liked the fusion of medicine and detail work (the kind of detail work that my architecture/engineering style mind loved to do). So I started going to some Pre-Dental Club meetings and next thing you know... I was hooked.

I met an orthodontist at Pre-Dental Club named Dr. Revels and he was a life-saver for me. I shadowed him quite a bit and he ended up writing one of my letters of recommendation when I eventually applied to dental school. He also was a big reason I pursued the Air Force HPSP (check the top of the page for more details on what that is) scholarship for dental school.

I made sure to keep up my grades, and suffered only 1 B (intro to psychology... WHAT?!) so I was on the right track.

Sophomore year, I hit the dentistry thing at full speed. I was elected as the Vice President of Communications of my fraternity and Secretary of the Pre-Dental Club. I also managed all A's through fairly rigorous science courses. My main focus this year was expanding myself. I tried to not just focus on grades but also on volunteering, leadership, etc. I kept up with my shadowing (for those that don't know what this means, check out the 'Pre-Dental Process' tab up top) and made sure I was taking the right classes. I started to understand the amount of work it was going to take to get into dental school and I soon found out that studying was going to be an every day thing. As I'll explain later, it certainly paid off.

Another thing I started doing during this year was taking summer, december, and may intersession classes. I didn't always NEED them (in one case, with Organic Chemistry 1, I actually did need it ASAP and took it summer between Soph and Junior yr.) but I took them just because I had to have them eventually and it gave me something to do. This eventually let me graduate early, which I'll discuss later.

Overall, this was sort of my 'plug away' year. I expanded my horizons and got involved with lots of different things and hit them all at full steam. I had managed to come away with all but 1 A freshman year and nailed a 4.0 both semesters of my sophomore year. As I would find out shortly, however, grades and leadership weren't enough to get into dental school... during my Junior year, I met the giant DAT monster.

Junior year, my classes were even harder... but I was more prepared to handle them. Despite this, I wound up with another B (Biochemistry) and ran for office again in my fraternity (this time, a relative downgrade to 'parking chair'... which was no fun at all) and in Pre-Dental Club (an upgrade here, to president!). So with my leadership rocking along and my grades holding steady, I faced a foe that tested me to the core.

In October of my Junior year (before I was elected to my new offices in December) I took a practice DAT for free with Kaplan. There are lots of these available, check out 'Pre-Dental' for links in your area. I scored a meager 15 but it was enough to convince me that I had the base knowledge required to shoot for an early try... my goal was to study over Christmas break and take it just before I went back to school in late January. A lofty goal indeed. For a breakdown of the DAT and how to prepare for it, go up top to the 'DAT' section.

Long story short, I did well enough to be pretty happy with my score (that is, after I freaked out 3 days before I was supposed to take the test, moved it back a week, got sick, had my car die the morning of the test... you know... the usual).

So there I was. Grades where I wanted them, lots of leadership and shadowing, and a solid DAT score. Now for the hard part... actually getting in to dental school.

Side note: I actually discovered that I could graduate early from all of the summer/intersession classes I took. Fantastic! This would end up cutting my Senior year into a Senior semester.

Summer between Junior and Senior year... this was when all the applying went down. I applied to USC, OU, Marquette, Nova Southeastern, and Creighton. I had very good reasons for each (in a way...) and I was happy with my choices. I pretty much spent the summer working and getting all my application stuff together as well as getting my letters of recommendation together...

Oh, and this was the time I started seriously looking into the Air Force HPSP.

Senior Year... Um actually, this turned out to be more like a half year, like I said earlier. This was the tail end of me being president of the Pre-Dental Club which was a great experience. I took my capstone class, as well as some other classes, and finished up with my college journey! But what about dental school?...

In October, I got an interview request from both Nova and USC... I pushed my Nova interview from mid-October to Dec 18 (in hopes that OU would take me on December 1) and I had no choice but to go out to USC when they offered so I got a nice little mid-semester trip to LA! OU got in touch with me in November and I went to that interview in early November.

On December 1, I got an e-mail from the OU College of Dentistry telling me I was accepted to dental school! My brain let out this massive sigh of relief that it had been holding back for the last 3 years and I promptly withdrew my application from all other schools once my deposit at OU was paid a few weeks later.

Around the end of my semester, I got a job as a high school math and chemistry tutor with a lady that is friends with my dad. I must say, it was the luckiest thing that happened to me because I was looking at possibly waiting tables again for a whole 6 months from January to July... and I just wasn't too excited about it.

(I also got accepted to the 4 year Air Force HPSP in early February 2010... I know that's not really Senior year, but we'll count it.)

So I'm accepted to dental school, accepted to the Air Force HPSP, and tutoring about 20 hours a week...

And that is where I am now... so read on and see what's going on with me right now!

From birth to college

Here is a quick rundown of my journey to college...

From my birth in 1987 to the end of high school:

From when I was born to about 4 or 5 years old, we lived in a house in Summit Place in OKC, OK. We then moved to a new house... in the same neighborhood... and were there for many many years...

In elementary school, I was the smart kid who played soccer every single day at recess. I was always very small and fast, and that worked to my advantage quite nicely on the playground. I remember wanting to be an astronaut when I grew up but that didn't happen. I heard astronauts had to be good at math and I wanted no part of that.

My most vivid memory from elementary school was when my kindergarten teacher sat me down and had a talk with me after I got caught stealing 'tickets', the currency of choice in a kindergarten class.

I was also in a Farm Fresh commercial when I was in kindergarten... oh the good old days...

As for middle school, this is my super awkward stage. I was pretty shy and just sort of weird, but I guess it all worked out. I had a massive growth spurt in 7th grade but sadly that was about all the growing I've ever done. I grew quickly and it gave me some knee issues, but I managed. I quit soccer before 8th grade to pursue football. My new dream: play in the NFL.

My most vivid memory from middle school was during PE class in the morning of September 11, 2001. They called off PE for the day and let everyone watch the news for a couple hours. It was the most unbelievable thing I had ever seen and I'll never forget what it felt like to watch those towers fall.

In high school, things pretty well went according to the generic 'high school kid' template. I played football, had a few girlfriends, and spent far too much time watching TV and eating. High school football probably had the biggest impact on me because it showed me what working hard over a long period of time can bring you. It made me appreciate doing something for the long-term rather than just doing it for instant success.

My most vivid memory from high school was when I tore my ACL days before our first scrimmage sophomore year. I had to sit out the entire year and had to play with a knee brace for all of my Junior year. This pretty much cut out all hopes of the NFL thing, so I refocused again. This time, I decided I wanted to be an architect... but as I'll explain later in the college post, that didn't really pan out either...

The reason behind all of this...

Well this is my first post, hopefully the first of many, and I'm doing this for a few reasons.

First of all, I do a bad job of keeping stuff recorded in some way and it will be really interesting to have this to look back on in the future.

Second, I have searched high and low on the internet over the past year for things that took me far too long to find. So I figured if someone does a google search for something I've blogged about, they'll have a first hand account instead of something more generic. Example: I would rather hear about someone's journey through P90X rather than snippets on the P90X website (and I've managed, over time, to find some!).

Third, I hope that this will inspire people to do exactly what they want to do. Throughout my life (and I'm sure this applies to the other 6 billion people out there), I have been guided from one point to another. Where I grow and learn the most, however, is when I decide to do something on my own, even if at first it seems like a complete failure. I plan to post fairly often (once a week too optimistic?) about what I'm up to and I will do my best to uncover the true nature of why I do (and did) what I do so maybe someone out there will be able to understand themselves from what I go through.

So this blog will talk about specific things I've done and advice I have about it, as well as just general "this is what's going on" sort of posts...

This first week, I'll chronicle what I've done to get to this point in my life, and see where it goes from there...