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Preparing for practice in the modern era - a new graduate's experience

BDJ Student volume 30, page 15 (2023)Cite this article

Summer is an exciting time for final year dental students around the country. The end of exams, graduation, GDC registration and the beginning of what many hope will be a long and fruitful career fast approaches. However, in many ways it is also an anxious time for new graduates, who begin to reflect on their time at dental school (perhaps some more fondly than others) and start to wonder whether they are well and truly prepared for the outside world and what dentistry really has to offer. As a new graduate from King's College London, I myself have been posing this same question. Have my experiences at dental school really prepared me for what comes next?

There is no doubt that the transition to independent general practice is both an exciting and terrifying time for any young clinician, regardless of the circumstances. However, I realise that to the more experienced clinician, dental school today may appear drastically different than it did in their time or even only a few years ago. Even those students just entering dental school may be witnessing a change in the current landscape of dental education. Subsequently, although this feeling of the 'fear of the unknown' is still a factor amongst final year students, it pertains to an entirely different source of angst for students in this day and age of dental school.

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References

  1. Ray M, Milston A, Doherty P, Crean S. In their own words: investigating the preparedness of final year dental students in the UK for independent general dental practice. Br Dent J 2018; 225: 340-349.

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  1. Ivy House Dental Practice, London, United Kingdom

    Triman Ahluwalia

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  1. Triman Ahluwalia
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Correspondence to Triman Ahluwalia.

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Ahluwalia, T. Preparing for practice in the modern era - a new graduate's experience. BDJ Student 30, 15 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41406-023-0977-z

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