dental school lately: vol. 5

One of the (many) reasons that I chose dentistry as a career is the flexibility. What other medical career offers such great hours? Even as a student, I've managed to make time to travel and see the world and really enjoy life on my schedule. 

But dental school lately has been quite the opposite. I've been preparing for a major exam and these last few weeks have been just awful. The material on the exam itself isn't that difficult, BUT there is a lot of it so making the time to cover everything has been a real challenge. Most dental schools give their students anywhere from 2 weeks to a month off from school to just focus on studying for the exam. I got 3 days. Unfortunately, my school accidentally overextended the amount of rotations students are on and decided that the only way to make things work was to take away study-time from the students. So the last several weeks have involved 4AM study sessions before 8 hour clinic session days treating patients. My evenings have meant a balance between doing the lab work I needed for my patients and trying to study as much as possible all before crashing. And weekends have been the worst of it with doing 10-12 hour study sessions. Not to mention, that in the midst of all this, I got 30 new patients because our seniors were preparing to graduate. These past few weeks, I've cut everything out of my schedule that I possibly could to make more time to study. I stopped working out completely, which is how I've managed to gain 8 pounds in only 3 weeks. Yikes! I haven't seen my husband in over 5 weeks because I made a conscious decision that I couldn't afford to lose the study time. Honestly, my life is in shambles. Now that I've taken my exam and had a chance to get a good night's sleep, I'm slowly getting my life back in order. I won't get my scores for another ~3 weeks and if I didn't get the score I needed, I have to start this process all over again. Why am I sharing how awful life has been lately? Because I wanted to make an effort to document every stage of this journey that is earning a Doctorate of Dental Medicine. Everyone has hardships during this process, these are just a few of mine lately.