My Take-Aways: Dental Internship Edition

Welcome to the 2nd edition to my Take-Away series! Today I will be talking about my internships at the two dental offices I worked at: Attleboro Dental Inc. and Raynham Family Dental. I did blog a lot on my experiences there, but here is a concise recap of what I got from it.

Interning in these two dental environments furnished me with skills far beyond the dental-related ones I gained.

• Taking Responsibility

  • From calling offices to even the small concerns like making sure to schedule a patient properly, I learned to be responsible always reminding myself that my actions can affect someone else presently or in the future.

  • As a front desk intern, I exposed myself to the EasyDental App, where I learned about scheduling patients, rescheduling appointments, scanning paperwork (yes, i never did this before), receiving payments, adding patient information, and towards the end, prescribing medication for patients to CVS.

    • I felt that making sure to give NPI information (new patient information) to new patients and simply handing that 6-month update clipboard to patients coming for a cleaning, required a good deal amount of responsibility because sometimes I would forget.

    • Even remembering patients' names for rescheduling or prescribing medication was a skill I needed to not mess up the schedule.

  • Waking up at 6 AM and working til 5:30 or 6 PM was not easy at all, but its something dentists do on a regular basis.

• Calling Offices

  • At both offices, I had the opportunity to not only to pick up calls from patients but to call New England dental offices for my denture cleaning research paper.

  • Given that I had minimal experience in calling other companies and people, this act of calling dental offices helped me choose the right words to say and be more of a sociable person overall.

Dental Knowledge/ Skills

• Obviously, I gained more knowledge in dentisitry. By observing my dad and the other dentist and assistants, I became familiar with the filling process and using a blue light etch to "harden" the material.

• I saw couple extractions being done and I even saw the process of applying a sealant.

• This sounds really cliche, but dentists REALLY have a lot of patience (no pun intended, patients too!) because the literal amount of times they have to cope with patients' concerns is unbelievable. Now I could witness many of the stories Dad tells from his office.

• I also noticed the communication skills required. You kinda have to sweet-talk the patient while also being blunt in the right time. Patients can be crazy, so dentists need that skill of calming them down.

• I noticed this 3D modeling app on the computer the dentists use and it fascinated me. The camera would scan all around the mouth area and produced a digitized model of of the patient's mouth so he could easily perform procedures. Really cool stuff.

I personally believe that this internship experience was absolutely incredible and just be being exposed to these dental environment helped me delve deeper into the field of my dreams. I appreciate the work dentists put into the lives of others. I will never forget the memories I made in the front desk.

But most importantly, I want to be dentist even more.