Are there labs in dental school like the undergrad courses have? As in, random experiments/techniques done followed by full lab write ups? I seriously had labs more than anything else from undergrad courses and I never thought until now that there might be some in dental/med school.
Labs in dental school
- Thread starter David1991
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Are there write ups for them or do you just do the technique and show what you've done?
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No write ups, there are no experiments (that I know of anyway). They are not training you to be a scientists, but dentists. You can participate in a prof's research lab, which might entail some writing, but this is extra curricular.
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I'm with you - I absolutely despised chemistry and organic chemistry labs in college. Dental school lab work is actually applicable and is completely different from any chemistry or physics labs in college, so no worries, it's a completely different world. You just do the lab work (drilling or filling a prep/crown, making a temporary, etc.) and either show it to a professor or turn it in.
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I'm really sick of hearing people say this. Education is not about learning facts, it's about learning to think on your own. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, "When am I ever going to use this?" I'd have been able to pay for dental school up front.
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I respectfully disagree. Memorizing a laundry list of facts from relatively arbitrary lectures from a series of good-to-horrible quality professors has little or nothing to do with learning to think on your own. I believe your argument falls apart when the question comes up: "Why can't we create an environment where we learn to think on our own about problems that we will actually encounter in the future?"
Business courses. Human Resource management. More time in Operative. Dental Research papers. All of these things, and many more, would be able to help us think independently while building our minds up for the future.
Hell, even an art course or two would be great. Nobody would take it seriously, but it would help with hand skills, and give us a chance to take our minds out of "science land" for a tiny bit every week. Pre-dent spends 3 years convincing us they want "well-rounded people", then chuck us into hardcore science for two years. Why not branch out?
Learning to think on your own is what happens when you are thrown into a challenging situation that requires creative solutions, not what happens when your mind is kept caged by the artificially-generated 'need' to memorize a thousand facts and statistics.
These facts are, most definitely, the basis for further, harder thinking, but in D1, they are trying to cover so many facts that this kind of independence is emphasized considerably less than it was in my undergraduate program. I'm really not sure why there isn't a bigger focus on how this is relevant, dentally speaking - one of my classes is a P/F class that has us read Dental Research Papers and learn more about them in a presentation setting. Wonderful - we get to read about thinking and experimentation done by really relevant people. I love the class.
Now why don't we try that kind of integration in Histology and Neuroanatomy? Clinical relevance would get me excited for these classes, rather than making them a boring hindrance to my real life.
School provides a wonderful potential environment to generate independent thinking, but when so much of your time is soaked by lectures and memorization, the best you can do is think as a side project.
