Dental school can be miserable, mostly because of how some d-bag faculty treat students. Once you get past this and graduate life as a dentist will be good.
... and the satisfaction you get when you realize that the dbag faculity is there because they couldn't hack it in real life.
I think it's not knowing a lot of things in the clinic and then making mistakes, I still haven't seen patients, and I only have 1 patient scheduled, it's a lot. Now our school took our lunch break hours, I spend the whole day sometimes on my feet w/o eating anything. They did 3 sessions of 2 hrs instead of 2 of 3hrs, w/ 1 hr in between. They say we have to manage our time better, and all but in between patients there is not much time (i haven't seen pt but we assist the ones that do) in between notes/pouring cast etc.
Always tell yourself that this is just the hazing requirements to get into dentistry. What you learn in clinic has very little relevance in real practice and you're being hard on yourself based on procedural/administrative protocols that have little bearing in real life dentistry. What you get out of clinic is what you put into it.
This may sound a little harsh, but if you have time to think about food, you may not necessarily be 100% focused on what you're supposed to be doing - training yourself and finishing graduation requirements. You have to learn to be efficient.
For notes: you need a notes template. The most thorough BS fill in the blank/circle the correct choice template/SOAP notes you can throw in there. Spend a few hours doing good notes templates even for the simplest prophy and you will be able to use that in real practice. ctrl-c, ctrl-v, edit based on patient. Done!
Pouring a cast: if it's for study models or where accuracy is not an issue, go buy some snapstone online, get some slurry water from your wet model trimmer and mix. You have 15-30 seconds depending on the concentration of stone in the slurry water to pour it up or else it's over.
Being a "doctor" means thinking outside the box. If you cannot think outside the box when thrown curveballs or in this instance, "time constraints", then that just makes you a tooth mechanic. Learn from others, learn from experimentation while you're still in school/associateship.
Satisfaction comes from finishing all your graduation requirements in year 3 and having the freedom in year 4 to do whatever you want (from goofing off, to pretending to do things, to actually pursuing independent learning from part time faculty with real world experience). I remember in year 4, we would hang out at the undergrad side part of the campus during lunch or signup and mess around at off-site rotations just to stay off the radar of admin till graduation
