Spring Semester of 3rd Year

A lot has happened since I last wrote but I want to get this post up that I've had sitting in the queue for several weeks. Robbie's spring semester of 3rd year is over! After a week of finals followed by a week where he had clinic all day, every day, he finally got a break. It was actually his first full week of just doing Dentistry since he started. At CU, they don't get any of their summers off so there are 11 semesters in total (he has now completed 8 of the 11!). It's unbelievable to look back and see how far he has come! It's even more unbelievable that he now has just three semesters to go! The 4th years just graduated at the end of May so I feel like I can officially call him a 4th year Dental Student.

One of the things that made spring semester of 3rd year feel different from previous semesters is that the students started completing restorative competencies. A competency is a graded assessment of different Dental skills you are required to have before you graduate. Each procedure has a certain number of competencies you must complete in order to meet the requirements and before challenging a competency, you have to complete that procedure a certain number of times. For example, the students must complete 7 quadrants (1/4 of a person's mouth) of periodontal scaling and root planing (commonly called a "deep cleaning") and then on their 8th quadrant, they can challenge the competency. For crowns, it's a 4 to 1 ratio.

Typically, you just have one faculty checking off your work but for a competency you must have two faculty separately grade your work. If you fail a competency more than a certain number of times, the school can require you to repeat a year of Dental School. In the rare case that you don't finish all of your competencies before graduation, you have to stay at the school and complete them before you can become a licensed Dentist (even if you passed your Board exams). This is how schools ensure that students have gained all the skills necessary to provide safe, quality treatment to their future patients.

Here are a few pictures from Spring semester:

Don't you love the artwork on the wall? My brother-in-law drew it! Anyways, here's Robbie working on some lab stuff for school.

Working on a wax-up

Me and my awesome supervisor on one of my last days at work

Me pretending to be sad as I throw away all of my old time cards from the past 2 years

Start of 3rd Year

We're about a month into Robbie's 3rd year of Dental School and I just have to say... 3rd year rocks! It's still hard work, but what makes 3rd year so awesome is that you are in clinic the majority of the time. Robbie still has some classes this semester (oral surgery, pediatric dentisrty, and implant dentistry to name a few) but now he's getting to do actual dentistry on real patients between classes. The work load is definitely lighter than previous semesters. On our drive home the other day I asked him if he needed to study and he said something like, "I feel guilty like I should be studying, but I just don't need to right now. I only have one test and it's in two weeks." Sweet! Let's go home and play Mario on the WiiU.

While the stress of huge class loads has eased, new challenges are definitely coming up. I know a lot of schools have one treatment room assigned to each student and that's where they see all of their patients. Or other schools just have the students go through different rotations and they see whatever patient is scheduled that day. At CU, however, you manage all of your patient scheduling and you have to fight to get whatever chair is available. Sometimes a chair will open up and you'll call your patient to see if they can come in on that day/time but by the time they call you back someone else has already filled that chair. What's even more frustrating is when you are all ready to go and the patient doesn't show up. Entire. Afternoon. Wasted. Still, I feel like he is learning valuable lessons about patient management that will come in handy if/when he decides to open up a practice of his own someday.

That's all I have time to write about today. I'm throwing a friend a baby shower tomorrow and I've got lots to get done before then! I'll post some cute pictures of that as soon as I can.