Thank you for your advice, but that doesn’t apply to me 🙃

At one of my interviews, we had the opportunity to ask a panel of current students for their opinions of their own school and advice for dental school in general. One of the students told everyone, “it’s not a matter of if you fail in dental school, but when you fail.” Every predental student that makes it to a DDS/DMD program has been succeeding at least academically, if not in most aspects of life, so it makes sense that this needs to be explicitly said to such students. At the time, I don’t think I entirely dismissed this advice, but I do remember thinking that the word fail is relative and maybe he means I’ll fail by my own standards, not fail fail. On second thought, ok, so I guess I did completely disregard his advice.

Let me preface by saying everything usually ends up ok. But, let me also say that I worry constantly and just because I can reflect on these moments and state failure is part of life, know my stomach was in knots when everything was happening in real time.

Disappointment

At Pitt, we take dental anatomy our first semester, which is a class about the shapes and functions of each individual tooth in the mouth. In conjunction, there is a waxing lab. We take little tooth nubs and use wax to build and carve teeth out of wax according to what we learn in lecture. It’s like an arts and crafts class with the added pressure of a time limit and the threat of a grade. Because the lab is only a few hours and I’ve never done anything like this before, I had to spend time outside of class on waxing up my tooth each week.

The first tooth we started with was #8, a maxillary central incisor. After twelve hours in total working on it, I decided it looked great, told my classmates in the lab I’d see them tomorrow, and left to put my supplies in my locker.

I may have psychic abilities, or at least I did in that moment because I was walking down the stairs, balancing my maxillary arch on top of everything I was carrying when I thought, “it would suck if I dropped this.” And I did. My arch slid off the box it was sitting on and hit the ground, leaving my little #8 on the floor, shattered into pieces. I was devastated! Not only had I put so much time into this one project, but I was so excited to be done with it and go home and focus on something else. Here I was staring at it knowing I was back at square one and had to go back to the lab. I kept telling myself not to cry and it worked, but only barely. I did what I had to do and restarted my tooth, with shaking hands.

Here’s where hindsight comes into play. I waxed the tooth again (this time, I don’t even remember how long it took me because I don’t think I wanted to know). I handed it in on time and I was proud of it. Ultimately, dropping my first tooth actually benefitted me because it forced me to practice my hand skills when I otherwise wouldn’t have practiced them. I hated it at the moment, and I felt like it was so unfair, but I bet my subsequent projects were better because of my extra practice. Or, maybe that’s just what I tell myself to make me feel like my time wasn’t wasted.

If anything, the events surrounding my #8 wax-up were wrought with disappointment rather than failure because I remade my tooth and got a fine grade on the project. I saw true failure my first month of school though too, don’t worry.

Failure

I just now looked back at my calendar and so I can say for a fact that this exam I’m referencing was my first ever exam in dental school. The class was biochem 1 and I was ready for the midterm. Not only did I study hours upon hours for it, but I did well in biochem in undergrad, so needless to say, I felt confident.

While taking the exam, I realized how serious the upper years were when they had told us D1s to memorize every single detail on every single PowerPoint slide from every lecture for this class. It was sooooo hard. I felt like I was guessing on every single question and only would have known what was going on if I had a PhD in biochem. I walked out of the exam predicting I failed, and I was right.

At the time, the most frustrating part about performing so badly was having spent the time and effort preparing for a grade that didn’t reflect my work. When I break it down, I was most upset about the failure not because of the grade in and of itself, though it did add pressure for doing well on the final, but because of the effect the failing grade had on my ego. Despite what that student said about inevitable failure in dental school back during that one interview, I always thought I’d do really well in school because I always had done really well in school. It was part of my identity. This first test of my dental school career contradicted my identity, which felt confusing and upsetting.

Although my performance in school still do very much so dictate how I feel about myself, failing this biochem test helped me at least realize that grades affect my ego first and my life last. I recognize that I should be proud of my efforts and that grades literally are meaningless; however, I can’t claim that I don’t care about them at all. Since this realization, though, I’ve made a conscious effort to pretend that school is pass/fail (bless all of you whose schools do that for you) and that even if I do fail, it means nothing. Because it doesn’t. At this point, all I have to do is learn how to be a good dentist and if it takes me more than one try to learn something, so be it.

A Work in Progress

Like I mentioned at the beginning, I’m so type A and I’m so not calm in the face of failures like the ones I’ve mentioned. Being calmer in stressful situations is something I work on every day. I can genuinely say, though, that since starting dental school, I’ve begun to care even just a sliver less about grades and a sliver more about my efforts and growth instead. Next time I perform “poorly” (and there is a guarantee that I will!) I’ll just come back here and read my words to remind myself that I’m just doing what I have to do to be a good dentist.