Thank you for your post, Terry, as it gave me a nudge in an unsuspected way. But that’s another story, so back to yours…

The flaw in your thinking is that if you graduate from something, you are going to have to do that for the rest of your life. As if your faith would be sealed. It’s not. You don’t have to be a dentist for the rest of your life and abandon all else. Who is to say that you wouldn’t create a hugely popular dentistry app in the future? Gathering knowledge is great and it’s never wasted. Also, you’ll better start preparing yourself for the fact that you can’t optimize life 😉 Stuff is going to happen that will completely change your plans anyway.

Also, is working for someone else one of the dreams that you have? Who’s stopping you from pursuing the life of an entrepreneur or freelancer? You will need a formal education to have a private practice in dentistry, but absolutely nobody is going to ask for a computer science degree in web or app design. Those are new technologies and require practical knowledge. Computer science is mostly about the theoretical science. Web technologies weren’t even part of our curriculum when I studied computer science, let alone something like Objective-C. I’m not saying that you wouldn’t learn anything in CS, but it’s just not one of the most practical degrees.

If I were you, I’d continue with the dentistry and have a degree that I could always fall back on, and continue studying programming related things on my spare time, and see if I could combine those two. But that’s just me and I’m not you 🙂