1. When people said, "Say goodbye to your life" when you enrolled, they WERE NOT kidding, they were merely stating a fact.
2. Your home basically becomes a place where you only sleep.
3. You spend so much of the day at uni that you only go home when it's dark and leave the next morning at the crack of dawn.
4. You learn how to speak "patient language" and somehow automatically switch that mode on when someone talks teeth.
5. You become hypersensitive to anything between teeth and feel absolutely comfortable telling someone that they have something between their teeth, regardless of whether or not they'll feel embarrassed.
6. No matter how handsome/pretty someone is, bad teeth will always be a deal breaker.
7. Conversations always end up about teeth.
8. You get annoyed when someone says "medical school is so much harder", because you know that's not true!
9. You realise most dental students fall into the same stereotype. Slightly obsessive, perfectionistic, high strung, probably mental, yet you'd proudly claim it.
10. You never realise just HOW politically correct your speech becomes, especially dealing with higher authority!
11. You eat more junk than you ever have, drink more coffee or caffeinated drinks than ever, study about the bad eating habits and get away with it because... you're a dental student.
12. People judge your teeth when they know you're in dental school.. Which is.. Not fair.
13. No one recognises the hours you spend in the lab to fabricate something for them, they only see it when it's flawed.
14. You never realise how emotional you can get when things go wrong, or how helpless you can feel about situations. Some situations in dental school.. you can never be in control of.
15. You feel a sense of satisfaction when a patient remembers what you taught them about oral hygiene and when they thank you for cleaning their teeth.
After all the long hours, the sweat, the blood and the occasional tears, it becomes all worth it when you know you've changed a person's habits and showed them what clean teeth should really be. Yes. Dental school is all consuming, it demands excellence from you, it builds you up to be someone you were not, it gives you the responsibility of someone else's health, it tests your tenacity, your resilience and your perseverance. For many, it builds character. I won't ever say dental school is easy, much less encourage anyone to enrol unless they have real passion for it, because it's not for the fickle minded nor the faint hearted. It's not for the money nor the prestige, (let's face it, how prestigious is it looking down someone's throat everyday?). It's for the true desire to provide a service to help, to improve lives and make a difference. At least that's what dental school is for me.
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