Many dental students often go through long and challenging study years since dentistry is also part of medicine. For those who decide to specialize further and become pediatric dentists, this means additional years of schooling, right from high school through to college. If you’ve been curious about what it takes to be part of this profession, keep reading.
What is a pediatric dentist?
A pediatric dentist differs greatly from a general dentist, and yet despite their differences, both professionals employ similar techniques and procedures in practice. A pediatric dentist is a dentist who specializes in providing comprehensive and primary preventive oral health care for children and young adults. They need the requisite skills to efficiently treat various oral diseases in babies, children, and adolescents, including children with special health care needs. This dentist also needs to teach their patients, no matter how small, about oral health and its importance and all the necessary preventive health care measures they can take.
It takes a lot to finally become a pediatric dentist, and this journey most often begins in school. While in high school, you can attend college fairs or apply for college admission counseling to help you decide if pediatric dentistry is the best fit for you. The role of a high school counselor or college admissions consultant is to help you outline your strengths and weaknesses academically to know the best form of higher education to apply for.
These professionals can also help every step of the way with your application process to your dream school. Once your counseling sessions have paid off and you’ve made it into your school of choice with sponsorship financial aid, you’re en route to fulfilling your life’s dream.
What are the qualifications to become a pediatric dentist?
The first step to becoming a pediatric dentist is receiving a bachelor’s degree. The evolution of education is such that a master’s degree is the basic requirement for entry into current job markets. Still, a bachelor’s degree is the minimum requirement you can have.
Whether or not you’re in an IvyWise school like MIT, Yale, or Stanford, your bachelor’s degree course should focus highly on the sciences. Courses such as biology, biological sciences, human anatomy, chemistry, and physics are great places to start. If you’re up for it, there are a few recommended yet not specially required courses you could add to this list if you want to go into pediatrics. These include child development, business, psychology, and economics. With your bachelor’s degree, a certificate with high grades isn’t as important as having some form of experience. At this stage, the best way to achieve this is via volunteering to work with children or in child-related clinical research.
The next step is to graduate from dental school and become a licensed dentist. This comes after four additional years of dental school, where you’ll study courses such as laboratory work, dental anatomy, human anatomy, and biological sciences. These courses are studied during the first two years of dental school while the next two years are dedicated to gaining field experience in a clinical setting. During these years, you’ll be working under the direct supervision of clinical professionals to diagnose and treat adult patients.
Once you become a licensed dentist, it’s time to sit through a board examination to receive your practice license. The exam consists of a written exam aspect, where your general knowledge of oral health will be tested, and a clinical exam aspect, where you’ll be watched and assessed on a clinical procedure undertaken either on an actual patient or plastic teeth. You need to pass the first stage to get to the second, and once you pass both, you’re ready to start your practice.
Becoming a dentist can be an arduous journey, but even more challenging is the path to becoming a pediatric dentist. You’ll require a lot of passion, both for the job and for children, to thrive, but once you meet these requirements, you’re well on your way to becoming the best at what you do.