Letter to a Dental Student

A current dental student was relating all the stress and frustration that is the dental school experience. I was remembering my time in dental school. That's a time most dentists want to forget. It is a stressful time with compressed time schedules, late night lab work, and endless examinations. We often had no dental assistant to help with patient treatment. There were what seemed like hours spent waiting for a "check" of a procedure from a faculty member. A doctor I know is an oral surgeon who has experienced both dental and medical school. He stated that dental school was actually much more difficult (although the medical residency was even more so). ---So, to any dental student:

For me the road seemed longest in my second year of dental school. One year completed and forever and a day to go. It is certainly a forbidding task to get all the "requirements" completed. Personally, I hated mundane lab work, carving wax patterns and setting plastic denture teeth in an articulator late into the night. I, therefore disliked prosthodontics (dentures). I knew I wanted to go into Pediatric Dentistry, so all this "other stuff" seemed designed exclusively to test my sanity. Still, in hind sight, all the difficulties you experience drift into the fog of the past and the skills and memories remaining that will stead you well. The juggling a dental student has to deal with is but a prelude to the business world's hustle. Enjoy, and do not fret too much. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

I remember the latter part of my senior year--all of a sudden the faculty accepted me as a peer, with more respect, as some kind of equal. They have been there before too, and respected the fact you made it through with your head held high.

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