When the cards are stacked against you…
Stepping onto the podium, shaking with the right, grabbing the DDS diploma with the left. I don’t remember much from graduation day.
I do remember how little I knew about dentistry though. I could tell ya with one hand how many root canals and extractions I had done at that point.
Now, think about what covid will have done to the last two graduating years of dental students.
If I were a student right now, I’d be hella pissed that I spent a full year’s worth of tuition and got just 75% of the experience. That’s the reality of living through a pandemic. You’re just shit out of luck with timing. Or if I could think of this in the best light, maybe it’s the best time to be graduating.
When I talk to these younger up and coming dentists. I get the sense of very two different perspectives. The first and most common, ‘I’m just trying to get more experience, I don’t know very much, I need SOMEONE or SOMEBODY to teach/give me more experiences. All I do know is what dental school has given me, which is half a root canal’
The second and less common, ‘I don’t have much experience, but I’ve used the extra time to do more CE, read up on the business components of practice and/or drilling on extracted teeth. I still don’t know much, but I’m a resourceful dentinal tubule ready to soak up anything you put on it.’
Tell me, if you had to pick a new grad coming out of school, who are you going to go with your gut feeling?
It’s going to suck with the last two years graduating dental classes. They got shafted like a surgical bur that doesn’t reach interradicular bone. This next graduating class will have to be resourceful early on. Much more than most other years. Just to prove they can handle the objections most opportunities will put in front of them.
The dilemma of not having much experience, is to create the experience for yourself. Dental school and a zombie virus apocalypse took away the full experience of what you could’ve gotten in a whole ‘normal’ tuition year. But to tell you the truth, none of us coming out of school we’re prepared for the rigors of the journey we embarked on in dentistry.
Dental school served only as a vessel to push us through the gates of permission to work inside some strangers mouth. You decided what cards you placed in your hands. You pick if you wanted more aligner, airway or even bread and butter restorative training. So stack the cards in your favor, create the experience in dentistry you’ve been wanting all along.
That’s my thrive.
Lam