Education

I was born and raised in Birmingham and have been here my entire life. Call it weird, but I’ve wanted to be a dentist since I was around 9 years old, so it’s been a long time coming.

My education was a key part of my training pathway and it started as early as GCSE’s. I progressed onto Sixth form where I sat my A-levels and applied for university, which was a big obstacle in itself! Interview processes are not easy and take a lot of preparation, and come with a tremendous amount of pressure. People will go to extreme lengths to make themselves stand out amongst the crowd to achieve an interview and offer from universities, so it’s important to understand that academics are only half the battle to gain a place at university to study dentistry – in an ever increasingly competitive process.

It’s important to ensure that you have skills outside of academics – communication, teamwork, leadership, professionalism, resilience skills; and also just being a likeable person. Looking back, I vastly underestimated the importance of these skills, but the further I progressed through university and then into my early career, I see more and more every day just how important these skills are!

Nonetheless I fortunately managed to obtain offers from several universities to study dentistry. Eventually it made sense – being a Birmingham boy – to study at the University of Birmingham, which I am very grateful for and believe that the course has moulded me into the professional I am today.

University

As I mentioned, I can wholeheartedly say if I were to go back in time, I would over and over choose the University of Birmingham to study dentistry at. The course was tough. The first two years consisted of very little patient contact and were very theory based, including a lot of medicine and anatomy. There were a LOT of exams and a lot of late nights revising. Toward the end of second year, we were introduced to ‘phantom heads’, essentially to practice basic dental skills on plastic teeth before being released upon real live patients.

Patient contact started early on in third year and this was the point where I realised that I genuinely loved dentistry and looked forward to making a career of it. The downside is that, perhaps, if one didn’t like it then it may have been a waste of a lot of time and effort. Along with patient contact came a lot of responsibilities – time keeping, admin duties, calling patients, booking patients in, sending patients appointment letters and more. Perhaps this was one of the hardest non-academic aspects of the course – having to complete a full time degree, whilst juggling reception/admin duties at the same time, it isn’t easy.

Eventually at the end of the course, the whole year was tentatively waiting for our results for our finals exams; the dean of the school came in and put on a pair of white gloves – a traditional sign to say everybody in the whole year had passed finals! This was the fourth time in the last 30 years that this was the case; there were tears of joy and many celebrations. I graduated with honours and a distinction in clinical dentistry – perhaps the reason I found the course so demanding was because I demanded a lot from myself and didn’t want to settle with anything less than excellence; however I hope this borderline OCD habit is something that will help me excel in the future!

Foundation Dentistry (FD)

This was a career shaping year and taught me a huge amount that university couldn’t. I worked at a busy practice in Acocks Green in Birmingham, a very ‘high-needs’ area where patients generally had many issues with their oral health and needed a lot of high volume treatment performed. During FD, I always had an educational supervisor (ES) on site in case I ever needed help. I will always be grateful to my ES Vish who taught me a great deal and will always keep in touch with the whole team at the practice.

FD helped me to develop a lot of the softer skills in dentistry. Although I started off very slow, I was eventually able to see a lot more patients than I did at university, meaning my communication skills and rapport building skills developed a lot alongside my clinical skills. Also, being the dentist, you are a leader of a clinical team consisting of nurses, receptionists and dental technicians, again linking back to the importance of teamwork and leadership skills that were assessed over 6 years prior. Times can also get stressful in general practice even during FD; there were many times where I had to call my ES in for help – be it a tooth I couldn’t take out or simply to get a second opinion on something I wasn’t sure about.
Unfortunately, with the process of FD, comes a lot of coursework, which was another responsibility to manage. It involved clinical assessments, reflective logs, audits and many more. I often found it mundane, but accepted the importance of completing everything and the relevance it bore for logging and reflecting on my development.

Perhaps one of the best parts of FD were the study days. I was placed within the Coventry Deanery (a selection of 13 FD practices in and around Coventry), and we had regular study days, usually once a fortnight, where we would all attend (usually at Coventry Hospital) a full day of teaching, often by specialist industry leaders.