Thursday, May 10, 2018

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. 


2 comments:

  1. Just know there are so many people who are so proud of you for how hard you're working (myself included!). Keep up the amazing work you're doing, because this is how you change lives. You'll get through this and be so happy you did!

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  2. Thank you Kayla, this was the sweetest

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