Springtime in Dental School
Before I was a senior dental student, I used to pull up their schedule online just so I could jealously admire it. “What must it be like,” I wondered, “to no longer have to go to class and just to show up in clinic each day?”
Now, I know — it. is. awesome. Through all those days and nights of studying and stressing, I’d tell Mykala “but hey, fourth year is really great!” At the time, she was understandably skeptical. But hey, this year has definitely lived up to expectations; the decrease in day-to-day stress is unbelievable. As students, we’ve started to get more leeway from our supervisors, in part because we’re rapidly talking and opining more and more like doctors and less and less like students. When people are working under your license (as we do with the dentists at the school), I’m sure it’s easy to give an almost-doctor more wiggle room than an overwhelmed second year student. So that’s nice.
My last hurdle this spring is tall: I have to find patients for a Sunday exam where, under stringent regulations, I perform dentistry and have it evaluated by a team of dentists. There’s a front tooth (Class III) filling and a back tooth (Class II) filling. Then, there’s a deep cleaning (the periodontal portion of the exam: scaling and root planing).
All this excitement happens one month from tomorrow on Sunday, February 26, 2012.
$1360 to take the exam. $15 spare patient-pool fee (if your patient doesn’t show up and you can’t produce one, you fail). $75 site fee. $175 V-ring system fee. $150 paid to patients, for their time. $300-400 paid to assistant.
You know what comes next. You can say it with me: getting done with that exam? Priceless.