Dentist here. I’m at the end of my career and currently just doing 1 day a week privately. I have had a long and happy career. Managed to avoid litigation and still love the job.
Interestingly my son showed no interest in following me into the profession, neither of my nieces wanted to join my DSis, who is also a dentist. I suspect they have been exposed to the reality of the profession.
Firstly it’s not for the faint hearted. It’s not glamorous, despite the thousands of TicToks by young dentists. There is a strong bias towards choosing it as a potentially high income career. It does pay well but there are much easier ways to make money than dentistry.
You are only really going to be happy in the job if you genuinely enjoy helping people. You need a strong moral compass and the ability to put ethics first and foremost. We are currently seeing an epidemic of patients returning from abroad having chosen discount dentistry with dentists who have no ethics.
Being able to demonstrate a vocation and awareness of standards of practice should help.
I have attached a link to current standards which is well worth a read. https://www.gdc-uk.org/DownloadHelper.aspx?docID=b3fb1d71-b8d8-467d-9f63-1a5dac5e62f1
There is a lot of information on the GDC site.
If you have come across the “Student Room” it’s worth joining. It’s a forum for and by students with chats about courses and all areas of student life.
Dentistry is a unique course since you are very much hands on from the start, working on real patients. The course is more like an apprenticeship in that it’s long hours and in the clinical years is very much 9-5. And with shorter holidays there isn’t much scope for a part time job so good financial support is essential. I was lucky, I trained in an era where tuition was paid but my parents funded three of us through five year courses ( my youngest sister did a phd in genetic biology) We were all on minimum grant ( similar to minimum maintenance loan today) so we owe our education to my mum returning to work to fund us.
As a student you spend a lot of time with other dental students building a lifelong network of dental friends. I am due to attend an annual reunion of the friends I shared a house with for 4 yrs, next month. It is 44 yrs since we all first met but have stayed in touch since then. And we keep in touch via What’s App group. We went to each others weddings, in fact two of them married each other and I have always felt that the boys were like adopted big brothers.
I will miss work when I retire fully but I do feel that I have achieved something in life. I’m just a big standard general practitioner but still leave work with a smile on my face when I’ve fixed a problem or improved someone’s smile. I’m now seeing grandchildren of patients I first started to see when I started in practice. I’ve cried with patients who’ve lost husbands, celebrated births and conquered nervous patients fears. It’s not all about the comfortable living.