For the movie people out there you'll recognize this line from The Hangover. It's a scene where Stu mentions something about being a doctor and his friend calls him out saying "he's a dentist, don't get too excited."
So here I am, finally done with school, and a dentist. But don't get too excited because for me this is really just the beginning. I've dreamed of this for a long time but really this is just my permission to being my career in a field that I find really fun and allows me to directly serve others. Toss in the Air Force gig and you've got the whole package. It really is a dream come true, I'm finally Dr. Matthew Lee!
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I haven't blogged in a solid 2 months and more happened in those 2 months than I can even wrap my head around right now. So let's rewind the tape:
1) WREB - Western Regional Examining Board
This was the regional exam I elected to take because I planned to get a license in Oklahoma and it was available at my school. Pretty easy decision. For the Air Force I can get a license anywhere but my home state is as easy as any. Details aside, I had to organize the back-up patient pool (since I was class president) and I'm glad I did because it really bailed a few people out. One of my patients was my brother and the other patient was not related to me but due to HIPAA, that's all I can really tell you. But he/she was wonderful. My endo section went very smoothly and I passed everything!
Here were my scores:
Not too bad! Things went well and that was definitely the most stressful test of my life since the DAT.
2) Graduation requirements
This fell into place very nicely for me and I was fortunate that it did. I borrowed a crown prep from another student in case the 2 I had left fell through and I'm glad I did. I had just enough points to graduate and, in fact, both of the crowns in my patient family ended up falling through. Imagine that! Endo was a minor nightmare for many folks and I scrapped by with exactly how many I needed to graduate. It's a shame too because I actually found endodontics to be very fun and I'm really excited to learn some new methods to perform root canals in the future (Wave One?).
3) Speech! Speech! Speech!
So one of the cooler things I got to do as president was give a speech at our Senior Dinner. This is a few days before graduation and it's where our class along with their close family and our faculty get together and eat expensive food together and dress really nice. It's a blast (I had to help last year so I had been once before) and once of the best memories I'll have of dental school.
Back to the speech part. I had to give a speech (aka "reflection statements") and I found that very exciting. I'm usually quite introverted and typically don't assert myself unless it's requested of me. When it is requested of me, I go all out and try to do my best. I got a lot of compliments after the speech which was very nice to hear and a comment I heard a lot was "I had no idea you were so funny"! Well if you were class president for 3 years and constantly stressing out about not only yourself but everyone else, you'd be a pretty serious person, too. That was over and I could be myself and my true colors came out I suppose.
One of the coolest parts about the speech was when I promoted the hashtag #oucod2014 at the beginning. To do that I busted out my iPhone and took a panoramic x-ray picture of the audience and tweeted it to @oucod2014, our official class Twitter account. I encouraged people throughout the weekend to use #oucod2014 on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter so we could go back and search "#oucod2014" and pull up a bunch of posts and pictures from that night and the next few days, including graduation. We actually had pretty good participation and it was a lot of fun. Here's the pano I took on stage as well as a picture of me taking it:
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| It was more awkward for them than me, watching me slowly take a picture of everyone |
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| Photo by Shak Feroz |
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| Photo by Shak Feroz |
4) Email this paper and now you're a Captain
I have had tons of forms to fill out for the Air Force which I will definitely not go into (at least not here). One of them was my new Oath of Office. It doesn't actually have to be signed by someone in the military, just a Notary Public. I went that route since he had someone in that capacity at our school. I got the form from her in a PDF and sent it off to the proper Air Force authority. A couples hours later I got a replying saying I was "good to go" so I'm pretty sure that means I'm a captain now.
Cool!
We're moving to Colorado Springs at the end of June, I'm flying out to COT on June 30, back to Colorado Springs on Aug 1, and my AEGD starts on Aug 5. Whew!
That's all for now, sorry I've been such a bum about posting lately. I hope to ramp this up more soon and flesh out some of the static pages on this site as well to have more information available. I want to comb back through all the hundreds (seriously) of emails I've gotten from you guys and make sure all the relevant questions are addressed on the "Got a Question?" page.
Until I post again, email me if you have questions! And in the meantime, check out my official website at MatthewLeeDDS.com!
