Why dentistry?
Dentists play a key role in the prevention, detection and treatment of oral diseases. Helping patients with their oral health can significantly improve their overall quality of life.
There are many reasons why dentistry is a worthwhile and rewarding career for example, it is a combination of both art and science and these can be two areas you find very interesting.
You are also directly involved in helping people on a daily basis whether that be through alleviating their pain or improving their self-confidence by improving their smile.
Dentists also build great rapport with their patients as they see many patients and families regularly for check-ups. This allows you to focus on longitudinal patient care and in some cases you are able to directly see patients develop their confidence and improve their oral health, which can be highly rewarding.
There are also many opportunities to specialise for example in oral surgery, paediatrics, public health, oral medicine and more. You are also able to maintain a fair work-life balance through controlling your working hours.
Mediteach Top Tips:
- Similar to the Why medicine question, you can talk about personal experiences to strengthen your answer.
- You can talk about how your work experience inspired you towards dentistry- for example seeing how the dentist had such a great rapport with their patients or seeing how the dentist put the patients at ease can be beneficial to talk about!
- Remember dentists also play a huge role in the prevention, detection and post-care of oral cancer. You can even search some of the signs of oral cancer to look out for to strengthen your answer.
- There are also continuous advancements in dental technology aimed at improving patient experience whilst providing timely and efficient results.
- An example of this is Digital Dental Impressions which relies on intra-oral scanning to record the anatomy/scan of the patient’s mouth. CAD/CAM technology is also becoming increasingly popular.
Please note all our answer guides are our views/opinions only 🙂
