What Dental School Demands

Dental school is full of challenges, but leads to numerous rewards. It requires you to work hard, be disciplined, learn from your mistakes and manage your time well. The most important thing to keep in mind throughout the process is your goals. Being focused on your goal of becoming a dentist will motivate you to do your best throughout the four years of dental school.

So, what does dental school demand?

1. Perseverance

Dental school is not like your undergraduate education. The work in dental school requires a lot of consistent effort to complete. Dental students sometimes get discouraged when they feel overwhelmed, especially when they receive negative feedback on their work. You must keep in mind that if you get negative feedback, then there is room for improvement, and to provide proper care to your patients in the future your skills need to be of high quality.

Dental school is not about how smart you are, but more about how hard you are willing to work to achieve your dreams.

2. Humility

Sometimes dental students find that they disagree with the opinion of a faculty member about the quality of their work. In these instances, it is often necessary to be humble and defer to the opinion of the faculty member. Although students may disagree, they must keep in mind that the faculty member is there to train them to be a competent dental professional and to treat patients to the best of their ability.

3. A sense of humor

Dental school is extremely challenging and can be stressful, but a positive attitude and a sense of humor will go a long way to making your four years in dental school fulfilling and enjoyable.

4. Honesty

Students will face many instances where their honesty is challenged. There may even be times when a fellow classmate asks for assistance on a test or an assignment, or for help by signing his or her name on an attendance sheet when he or she didn’t actually come to class. It is important to remember that faculty will see what you do in dental school as a possible example of how you will act in the practice of dentistry in the future. As a practitioner, will you lie on patient records, claiming you completed a treatment that you did not? Will you deny writing a prescription for a friend that is a substance abuser? Will you commit insurance fraud? As you can see, honesty in dental school is very important to uphold the honesty and credibility of the dental profession as a whole.