Dental degree

It's just a huge honor to be podcast interviewing Dr. Jill Tanzi, a practice owner, advocate, and leader in the independent dentistry movement.

A valedictorian of Oxford High School in Massachusetts, she earned her B.A., cum laude in biology from the University of Rochester and her DDS with honors from the University of Maryland, which was the first dental school in the world, wasn't it? University of Baltimore? Yeah, first one in the entire world.

I think my dental school, UMKC, was second.

I'm not sure.

Um, if you graduate from a dental school in Pennsylvania, the degree to conferred upon you was DMD, doctor of medical dentistry.

Um, the predominant number of states in the U S dictate that dentists get a DDS, a doctor of dental surgery.

Um, I like the name DMD better because it has medical connotations.

Exactly.

What's happening right now? Good day, San Diego Comic-Con.

This is Roger Schuster, DDS.

That's Doctor of Dental Surgery.

I am Weird Al's former dentist who played the Midwest air-driven high-speed dental drill on the song Cavity Search from his double platinum...

I only know him as Artie, but his real name is Dr. Arthur Volker.

He's got his, are you DDS or DMD? DDS? F-A-G-D? Yep.

And then diplomat in minimally invasive dentistry?

It's defunct now, but it was the World Congress of Minimally Invasive Dentistry.

It wasn't until 2017 when I officially left private practice and transitioned into my full-time position teaching at a dental school in San Francisco.

And since then, I've worked with admissions for both our DDS program as well as the DDS and PhD program, served on like a dozen committees on curriculum development and clinical affairs, became a course director and a group practice leader, and now serve as the chief of my division, which means that all the general dentists who work in simulation and or supervising direct patient care for our pre-doc program report to me.

Let's rewind this.

How did you end up in dental academia? Because you weren't one of those people who came to dental school saying, my goal is to be a full-time professor one day.

Contact the dental schools in your area, or if you're willing to relocate for a position, then check out what opportunities are in those other areas that you want to go to.

The ADEA website has a job search engine for academic positions all over the country, but sometimes openings will be advertised on LinkedIn or Indeed as well.

And don't limit yourself to DDS programs alone.

Look for dental hygiene programs or dental assisting, hospital and community-based residency programs.

And so when we looked at it, they were spending they were spending thousands of dollars in Google ads.

But some of the keywords that they that this automotive marketing agency were promoting for the dentist was DDS services near you.

You know, for those of you that can't see me, I've got my hand over my face like a facepalm.

Like, why would you advertise for something like that? And it's just because they don't specialize in the dental space.

It's like the person who's running those marketing campaigns doesn't know.

what DDS actually is, right? And

plus there's a lot of DMDs out there too.

And nobody does that search though.

Infant do soleal.

How many years in practice after DDS to become max fax? Years in practice? I don't know what we mean by practice, but after DDS.

So you get your DDS or DMD after you graduate dental school, right? And oral surgery is either four or six years after that.

The six years, that extra two years, because you spend those two years in medical school to get your MD.

Although it's not necessary to be an oral surgeon, right? didn't need your MD.

I wasn't top of the class.

I wasn't bottom of the class, but I got my DDS and then I was a dentist.

And so I went out to get my first job as a dentist and And I had kind of an awakening.

And I figured out a lot of the reasons that I wanted to become a dentist just simply didn't exist when you were working for someone else.

He threw it over to me and said, "You might wanna look at this." And took the exam 'cause it was cheap, and had a good time in Houston, and, and apparently I must have done really well 'cause I got into every dental school I applied to.

And then when I got to dental school, they said, "C equals DDS," and I went, "Pfft, I can do C. I, I got C easy." I mean, we used to drink before gross anatomy tests, and we would, we would do shots.

Like, if you missed, uh, some cranial nerve or whatever, you had to do a shot, and so we'd go in hammered the next morning to take the exams.

So, um, so I got into dentistry a, in a v- very circuitous route.

Yeah.

And it was actually a dentist in Ca- in, uh, Texas named Tim Rainey, uh, DDS, MAGD, that, um, it, it's called the Rainey Ridge.

That, that, that transverse ridge, it's on the molar too.

You just always think it's on the maxilla 'cause it's real big.