10 Things I Learned During My Second Year of Dental School
Last year, I wrote a post called 10 Things I Learned During My First Year of Dental School. It's only fair that I chronicle the 10 things I learned during my second year of dental school.
The honeymoon period is officially over. Remember when you started dental school and people were excited about meeting their classmates? Remember when everyone wanted to hang out with each other every single waking moment of the day? Well, nobody wants to hang out anymore. Your number of "friends" begins to dwindle. Pretty soon, you'll only see two people consistently outside of school. One of those is your roommate.
If you're single, you are a minority. Sometime in the middle of second year, everyone suddenly decides to become a couple. Your classmates also start getting married left and right.
It's totally healthy to drink 4-6 cups of coffee a day. Or buy a venti-sized coffee from Starbucks with five extra shots of espresso...
You learn to fake it till you make it. It might be your first patient ever and you have to do scaling and root planing. "Have you done this before?" asks the patient. "Of course!" you reply cheerily, hiding your obvious panic and trepidation, "I've done this a hundred times". You conveniently leave out the fact that those "hundred times" were done on a typodont in sim lab.
The Jet liquid used for making dentures acts as an amazing nail polish remover. Especially after you paid $30 for a french manicure the day before...
You will always be broke. Your friends from high school and college are all working at amazing 9-5 jobs. They have a life after 5pm and paid vacations. They are all making exponentially more than you since you are currently raking in negative $118,070 a year. Don't believe me?
Get used to living in sim lab. You might as well bring dinner, a toothbrush, toothpaste, sleeping bag, pillow, and a change of clothes with you.
Scrubs become the best wardrobe that mankind has ever invented. Woke up late? Can't decide what to wear? Too lazy to pick out matching outfits? Lost all your fashion sense in dental school? Gained a little too much weight and want to hide it? Just put on a pair of scrubs!
And about that weight gain, your physical fitness will peak at the end of your first year of dental school. When you are setting dentures in sim lab until 11:42pm, the last thing you want to do is go to the gym. And when it's 11:58pm and you haven't eaten dinner yet, the McDonalds down the street becomes awfully tempting.
Acrylic provisionals are your WORST ENEMY. They tend to throw themselves down the sink, fly halfway across the sim lab, mysteriously shrink in size, crack in half, or pull a disappearing act with the finesse of Houdini five minutes before the end of a practical exam.
And a bonus one:
No matter how much you study, you will never ever feel prepared for your NBDE Part 1 Boards.
