1/4 Dentist

First day of first year.  That's my forced very nervous half grin.

Well we made it through the first year.  In some ways it was easier than we had anticipated, in some ways it was harder, and all around I don't think we really had any clue what we were getting into.  Looking back to where we were a year ago really blows me away.  We were still fairly new to Greenville and uninitiated to its ways.  I was trying to digest all the information they were giving us at orientation and hide how much I hated having to meet new people.  Kristin had just started her first job here.  Captain Flint had just joined the family and was still staying in the half bath.  We didn't know we would soon have a sweet baby niece.  A lot has changed.

When I started school I expected the coursework to be difficult and to breeze through all of the clinic and lab work.  It had been five years since I had been a full time student, and I had worked in a dental office that whole time.  I have learned that contrary to my previous assumptions, having been a dental hygienist doesn't automatically make you the best dentist in the world.  However, it has given me a tremendous leg up.  The coursework has been difficult, but not nearly as bad as I dreaded.  The only really bad part of the didactic portion has just been sitting through 8 hour lectures.  The hardest part of school has honestly been the clinical side of things.  It hasn't been difficult in the sense of hard to get the hang of, or requiring long hours outside of school, but has been very tedious.  Working in an actual office you get to interact with people and kind of feed off of their appreciation and excitement.  Our plastic mannequins don't provide much in the way of feedback and nobody would be appreciative of the kind of fillings I've been putting out so far anyway.  It gets tiring just sitting there going through menial tasks that I know should take 10 minutes, but still take us 3 hours.  It is also hard doing things the way our professors want them done, not the way I think they should be done.  That has been the hardest part of coming in with so much background.  I have so many preconceived notions of how things work and have formed so many habits of how to do things.  Obviously a school setting is a lot different than an actual office and a dentist looks at things a lot differently than a dental hygienist.  I have to fight the urge to write so many people off as uneducated, inexperienced, condescending morons, and realize that they actually have a lot of knowledge that I can benefit from and know way more in their field than I likely ever will.

Over the course of the year I may have gotten a little too big for my britches (okay I may have been a bit of a weenie before I started too).  During orientation they told us that we were bound to fail something over the course of our first year and to go ahead and get used to the thought.  Well I kept clicking right on through weekly tests without every coming close to failing, passed each and every lab competency without trouble, quizzes and projects didn't trip me up.  I had been a teaching assistant for radiology and was been one of five students in our class offered a job as tutor to subsequent classes.  I headed into the final week of the first year with a perfect record and was feeling pretty darn full of myself.  That was just dumb.  We had a final lab competency where we had to prepare a lower molar for a crown.  The school charges us for extra teeth on which to practice and we have to practice on our own time.  Since I figure I pay them more than enough as it is I wasn't about to pay for extra teeth.  Besides that I consider this my job and a job to me is 8-5 so anything past that isn't going to happen.  Needless to say I didn't practice and flubbed it up royally.  Well there went my perfect record, and in its place came a nice letter stating that until a successful retake of the assignment I would receive a grade of incomplete on my transcript for the year.  That prompted the purchase of extra teeth as well as some "overtime" practice in the lab.

Extra practice over break. Note the look of consternation.

Apparently the lab is a popular place on the weekends before retakes.

Thankfully I retook the assignment last week and am glad to report that I have officially finished my first year of dental school.  I can't wait to see what this year has in store for us!
~Buzzy