Christine Beyleveldt

It still feels entirely surreal that after three long years of working toward my dental hygiene credential, I’m now staring down the finish line.

I’ve just completed my first year of the program and I’m enjoying some down time. Relaxing has become a foreign concept, but I’m doing my best. I had a whole set of notions going into the program in September. I thought my dental assisting background would give me a leg up. And then on the first day, I received my instruments and nearly cried because I had no idea how to use any of them. This is for anyone out there thinking of applying for the program, because I don’t want you to feel humbled as dramatically as I was.

First and foremost, this program is not for the faint of heart. The application process is gruelling, but I already detailed that in an earlier post. Once you start, though, it doesn’t let up. We take more credits each term than law students take in a whole year, and that covers everything from head and neck anatomy to embryology, dental histology, microbiology, oral pathology, radiology, nutrition and psychology. That’s just the first year, by the way. I fully expected to give up my social life going into my first year in September, and I’m just now beginning to feel the tension in my neck and upper back after spending six straight weekends reviewing microscopic slides of oral bacterial, fungal and viral infections. (Side note: don’t study on public transportation.)

You have to want it. Badly.

It takes a certain kind of person to enjoy scraping plaque off people’s teeth all day. But we do so much more than that, and it won’t be immediately evident. I think the starting salary blinds some prospective students who then realize later that this line of work can be monotonous and, quite frankly, a little gross. But as primary health care providers, we’re in a unique position to prevent oral disease. And because the mouth is the gateway to the rest of the body, systemic disease, too. One of the most fascinating things I learned this year was that diabetes and gum disease are linked on a molecular level, and I’ve spent the last four months working on a research paper to prove the link between sleep apnea and gum disease, too.

Making friends.

I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong about one thing. Unlike my undergrad, I’ve become incredibly close with my future colleagues. For that is what we were instructed to think of each other as. Getting into this program was fiercely competitive and we entered with the mindset that we had to continue to compete with each other. That was until about a month in.

One day in October, an instructor told us that we weren’t fighting for our places anymore. We had already proven ourselves. They chose each and every one of us because they wanted us all to succeed. It was like someone had flipped a light switch. We started to offer each other our support, and I can honestly say I’ve never felt so loved by my classmates.

Pushing yourself to succeed.

I believe the love we’ve shown each other over the last year has been what got us through the first year. In September, we noticed we were a rather large class. 28 instead of the usual 22. Well, it turns out the graduating class of 2024 had been cleaved in half after their first Christmas. Our instructors told us they hoped to get a full graduating class out of us on the off chance a similar thing happened. That absolutely lit a fire under our heels and I’m proud to say we are still 28 strong. Actually, it’s a little troubling that there won’t be enough operatories in our clinic to fit all of us and the incoming first years next year.

Even if you excel academically, clinical rotation will push you to your limits. You have control over the hours you spend studying, but you don’t have control over your patients’, and if they can’t make it to the clinic, that puts you in a tough spot. This last term pushed us to our very limits and tears were a common occurrence. 

Many students going into this program have stellar grades and don’t know what it’s like to fail, and that’s why I’m grateful I failed organic chemistry and had to try again. You will fail something in clinic. In fact, it’s set up in such a way that the instructors expect you to fail the first time so you can learn from the experience and try again. That’s why they give you three tries to attempt instrumentation assessments. But when you fail your first assessment it still comes as a blow. After that, it gets easier. Hope for the best but expect the worst, as we like to tell each other. It’ll all come right in the end.