Is it hard to become a dental assistant?

Should I become a dental assistant or dental hygenist?

• I don't know which on to do the main reason why I want to be a dental assistant is because it doesn't take as long and I want to move our of were I live now but I know dental hygenis gets paid way more. So I wanna know how much is the dif with school and money?

• Answer:

  BIG money difference! Like twice as much, sometimes way more than that! In a lot of states (maybe all, not sure on this), you don't even have to go to school to bve an assistant. I know in NY, sometimes you'll see an ad: "Dental Assistant wanted, NO experience necessary, will train". That's the kind of ad to answer really quickly. The dentist will be looking for an energetic, personable, and fairly bright person he can train to HIS ways. Then you get experience on the job, learning so much. After a while, you move on to another office, and learn more techniques, and just keep adding to your skills. I hear it can be a few thousand dollars to learn to be an assistant. Dental hygiene, on the other hand, takes a minimum of 2 years at a community college, and sometimes 3 - depending on your pre-requisites. It's kind of hard, but if you apply yourself and develop good study habits, it can be done with average intelligence. I'm certainly no rocket scientist! What you might want to look into, is seeing if you can find an on-the-job- assistant thing like I talked about, and then at night, start taking some comm. college classes that you'd need for DH - English, psych, sociology, bio w/lab, chem w/lab. Then you could go into a DH program with a lot of pre-reqs out of the way, and be able to go to college and have a life at the same time.