GRADUATION!

DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE!DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE! DONE!

I officially finished all of my requirements near the end of April and graduated on May 13, 2010.

In two years I did the following:

RESTORATIVE:

• 15 crowns: (this includes preps, a bridge, coping try-ins (when the crowns weren’t gold), waxing up, spruing and investing, casting (when the crowns were not PFM’s), and delivering. At Temple we do EVERYTHING.  I had one crown sent out to a lab because the porcelain was a butt joint margin.
• 12 Dentures: We are required to only do 11, but I miscounted my completed dentures and ended up doing an extra one because I thought I was going to be shot of my requirements.  This includes any necessary extractions, tori removal, and alveoloplasties the patient needed.  Primary and final impressions, border molding, facebows, articulating models, framework design, framework try-ins (where applicable), setting teeth, wax rim try-ins, teeth try-ins, delivery, and THREE follow up appointments (or no credit).
• 30 points of class II amalgam: Amalgam points are based off of the equation that {points = number of surfaces restored + 1} So a MO is equal to three points and an MOD is worth four points.  I barely got this one done in time. The majority of my patients wanted composite – luck of the draw!
• 15 points of class II composite: This was easy to get for me – all my patients wanted composite.
• Miscellaneous composite + amalgam:  These are all the other operative points you need to get from doing occlusals and facial restorations.  I did enough composite restorations for three students so this was not a problem to get.  Like I said, all my patients wanted composite.
• Two caries risk assessments: This includes a survey, a spit test (to see S. mutans and Lactobacilli levels in the mouth), and a diagnosis and prescription to decrease the patients risk level for caries.
• Multiple competencies: Crown, denture, treatment plan, perio, endo, oral surgery, class II amalgam, class III composite, pedo, etc.
• Miscellaneous points:  Anything extra, like a post and core (I did about 8 post and cores, a mix of cast and prefabricated), build-ups, occlusal guards, bleaching trays, etc.

ENDODONTICS:

• The requirement for an ‘A’ grade is to do at least three molars and then get enough points to reach a certain number of points for an A grade.  Anterior teeth are worth 10pts, premolars are worth 15pts, and molars are worth 20pts.  I completed root canals on 5 anteriors, 1 premolar, and 3 molars.  We do not get points based on the number of canals – just the type of tooth treated.  Glad to be done with these – I never have to apply a rubber dam again.  You do not get points if you go to the emergency endo department and do a pulpotomy or a pulpectomy – even though this is half the root canal. I probably did about 20 pulpotomies. Dental school can be frustrating at times because of these policies, but, such is life.  Not that I care anymore – I’m done!

ORTHODONTICS:

• Do a simple case.  We learned just enough about ortho at Temple to be scared enough to refer everything out. I finished an invisalign case that was started by a senior before me.

PERIODONTICS:

• Cases are divided into 1/4 case, 1/2 case, or FULL case depending on the severity of the patients oral health.  This requirement is easy to attain at Temple because most of your patients have some sort of periodontal disease and they need a good scaling and root planing.  A whole page could be written telling you how many teeth Temple students scale.  All my classmates would agree.

Oral Surgery:

• I stopped counting the number of extractions by the end of my junior year because I was done with my senior year requirements.  This is simply because when a patient did not show up I would volunteer in our ‘point-n-pull’ clinic.  I am estimating that I extracted almost 300 teeth.  Temple just started a PORT program that I was able to participate in during the last few months of school.  PORT stands for Pre-Oral Surgery Resident Training (I think).  More complicated cases of extractions were referred to the PORT program and the students assigned were able to do them.  Through this I was able to do a little more than a dozen of partially and fully impacted teeth.  The first few patients were dental students (you guys were good sports) and I considered them to be my experimental patients. We also got to do a week long rotation with the Temple oral surgery residents.  This included scrubbing into the OR, and helping with consults. Include the trip to Haiti and my externships and I easily extracted over 500 teeth in dental school.

OUTREACH:

• 12 days of outreach at satellite locations in the Philadelphia area.  This was nice because it allowed us to get points quicker and we were able to see more patients during the day.  It kind of gave you a sense of private practice – but just a little.  You still had to do a lot of the tasks that I would normally assign to an assistant or employee, like cleaning up and setting u for the next pt., taking radiographs, prophy, etc.  Sometimes at our outreach clinics I would see two patients, and sometimes I would see six patients in a day.  It depended on the schedule.

PEDODONTICS:

• I did lots of operative, a few pulpotomies, stainless steel crowns, and quite a few extractions.  Enough said.

RADIOLOGY:

• This requirement was fairly easy to attain.  If you show up for your rotations and do something then you will get it done.  You have to take pans and FMX’s and then write a report on it.

After your requirements are done your road to graduating on time is not complete.  You still have things to do. There are several departments that you have to be cleared through in order to graduate.  Each department has a different thing for you to do to be cleared.  Some of these tasks are easier than others.  Clearing out your locker is easy. Dropping or transferring all your patients is a bit more difficult.  Most student’s patient list is anywhere from 20 to 40 people.  Each one of these has to be dropped or transferred to another student.  If the patient needs a recall, you need to finish that recall before you can transfer or drop the patient.  Pretty much it involves a lot of phone calls, a lot of running around the school, and a lot of BS.  It took me the better part of three weeks to finally transfer my last patient (I had about 34 patients on my list).  I made it easy on myself and transferred/dropped patients as the school year went by.  If you are a Temple student, plan accordingly.  If you don’t need requirements from them anymore, or you haven’t seen the patient in a while, or they are unreliable – Drop/Transfer them right away.  Save yourself the headache.

After everything is done and you are cleared you walk upstairs and request a ‘Termination of Clinical Priveledges’ form.  You sign it and then you are officially done.  My signing was pretty anti-climactic. I thought the heavens would open and the angels would sing ‘Hallelujah’ with bugles and glitter and balloons falling from the ceiling.  I was wrong.  The secretary handed me a paper and after I signed said, ‘congratulations’ with a hint of ‘I have said this once too many’ and I walked out of the office.  I made a beeline for the exit of the school and I drove home.  I think the feeling was too surreal to fully comprehend.  Four years of grueling work, all done. Nothing more to do. The drive home was like the ending of a good movie, where the protagonist drives through the neighborhood in slow motion, pointing to all his friends. It took me a few days to fully relax.  No more rubber dams, no more amalgams, no more root planing or scaling…

So now what?  What will happen with this website?  I will keep it of course, and update it periodically.  We are all students for life afterall, and if you don’t know that, well, then you don’t practice dentisTRY.