4th year of Dental School

We knew during Matt's 4th year of dental school we would have to figure out how to get the ball rolling with his training and PCS orders and such. Luckily, at that point, an awesome recruiter had been sent to JBLM and contacted Matt and another dental student who was in the program. If you ever have a problem with needing information, just contact the local recruiting office and they should put you in contact with the right person....eventually. We were able to get the information needed to figure out how to send in our "requests" for where we'd like to be stationed. That was done at the beginning of 4th year. We later got back a response with a list of probably 30 posts we could choose from. They had us send back a list of 10 preferences in the order we wanted. We chose, in this order I think, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Korea, 3 different posts in Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky. It was at this point that Matt finally had someone to contact with questions.

All dental students have to apply for an AEGD (advanced education in general dentistry)with the military at the beginning of 4th, regardless of their desire to fulfill one. Matt applied, got accepted, and then declined. After talking with other military dentists and doing some research, he felt he'd get great exposure just working on post. There is a 1 year AEGD, or a 2 year comprehensive option. If you choose to do either of those, they don't count as part of giving your years back to the military, but they don't count against you either. They are dead years. So, if you chose the 1 year AEGD, you'd have a 5 year military commitment after dental school. You do get paid a salary at your rank during those dead years though, so that's something to consider.

We were told at the beginning of January of his 4th year (so the last semester) that we would receive orders by the beginning of March. EVERYTHING is done by email, so make sure you have one email address where everything military is sent. I know my husband has 3-4 different email addresses so I quit trying to keep up. The beginning, and the middle of March passed and I was getting anxious. I learned to expect all sorts of delays with the military; after all, they are a government institution. We all know how efficient the government agencies are haha.

So, I think we finally got our orders on March 21st. It was the day I was talking to a wife of a retired army officer and she said we probably shouldn't expect them until the end of the month. We were visiting his family and I had literally just been complaining about not knowing where we were going when he came in and said "we got our orders, guess where we're going?" I guessed Oklahoma or something like that because the last place I wanted to go was to the midwest. I love my mountains, and I hate the idea of tornados for some reason. So, I skimmed through the email to find we are being sent to..... SOUTH KOREA. That was honestly the last place I thought we'd go haha, but we were excited. We honestly just really wanted to go overseas. We wanted a chance to expose our young kids to other cultures. Korea isn't a place many people put on their list, and we have since learned that anyone who did put it anywhere on their list, that's where they were sent. The military has been trying to make it seem like a more family friendly place since most people still think of it as a hardship tour. A hardship tour is one where your family usually won't go, and it won't last longer than a year. Korea has changed from that, but it seems most people don't really know that.

So, when you are trying to choose your preferences, do some research and make sure you think of what will be best for your family, and for your future dental career. ALSO, if you are unfamiliar with military life, be prepared to not understand much from your orders. We had to sit at a computer and look up all the acronyms in order to understand everything from the orders. It took probably an hour at least.

We were really excited to get the ball rolling on everything to ensure we (the kids and I) were able to go with Matt, but the military wasn't used to people being on the ball about everything and quickly let us know that we had to wait to do anything until he was active duty. This, was very frustrating. His orders were for him to report to BOLC at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio on June 12th, and to Yongsan in South Korea no later than July 30th. He wasn't allowed to report early to BOLC, but could report as early as he wanted to South Korea. Since training ran through July 25th, an early report wasn't in the cards for us.