crdts
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Despite my idea that I wasn’t going to write more about it, I might as well record this thing for posterity. I’d like to describe in detail, both for myself, for my wife, for my future children, what it was like to survive “the worst hazing in all of medicine.”
The first thing you must understand is the way that licensing works. Licenses are doled out by states, and certain fiefdoms have been established around the US where you have to take a certain test to practice dentistry there. So, you do not receive your license, that is, your legal permit to do the job of a dentist, from your dental school. You receive it from the state in which you plan to work. Thus, upon graduation, you receive your school’s diploma and then you submit materials to apply for a license. I think that all of us working in Minnesota will apply for “Licensure by Exam”. That requires the following:
We are five days away from my final final final (final) board exam: “Central Regional Dental Testing Service, Part IV & V”. In this one, I spend 9 hours at the school working on patients, proving that I can do selected procedures at an acceptable clinical level. Doing the procedures isn’t hard, it’s the proving that you can do them that can be tricky. There’s a lot of paperwork, and a lot to coordinate.
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.