Dentists’ advice for dental school graduates

So you’ve just graduated from dental school. Now what? Navigating the beginning of your dental career can be tricky! You know how to do crowns, but no one taught you how to file claims, fill your schedule, and grow your dental career. To shine some light on the topic, we talked with five of our Top Practice award winners to hear their key pieces of advice for dental school graduates. Check out the video below or keep reading to soak in their collective wisdom.

The bottom line? New dental school graduates should do the following:

• Find good mentors
• Decide what you like to do (even within dentistry!)
• Don’t chase the money!
• Learn the insurance process
• Stay humble
• Keep learning
• Remember why you picked dentistry

Be flexible and prepared for chaos

Mostly everyday is not going to be ideal, no matter how good you are. Somebody’s going to fall off the schedule, or somebody’s going to call in sick. I told my staff a month ago that I would give them a bonus if we can get everyone to work two straight weeks without being out. It hasn’t happened yet! It’s because things happen. So that being said, you have to be able to operate amidst chaos, even though you don’t create the chaos. You have to be able to have the focus in mind and be a great leader and tell everyone, “Hey, listen. You have to pull in the same direction regardless of what’s going on.” If you can communicate that to your staff and eventually your patients, I find that they are understanding. 

A lot of new dental school graduates go into corporations, which is fine. They give money security, but after a while a lot of dentists don’t stay there. This is because they’re feeling a void of wanting to have their own ownership and run things their own way. When you get on the private practice side of it, it’s a different ball game. You don’t have the venture capitalist money to throw money at everything. Money doesn’t solve all problems. So before you make the private practice leap, you have to get in, really dig deep, and make sure it’s something you really want to do.

• Dr. McDonald

Find good mentors, develop communication skills, and learn the insurance process

Find good mentors. Whether that’s a GPR or private practice. 

I think you should learn how to effectively communicate and sell the dentistry that you’re recommending. Keep in mind that “sell” just means you’re clearly outlining the benefits to the patient. If you can effectively communicate, you’re going to help the patient be healthier and you’re helping yourself financially. Then everyone wins. 

Additionally, you should learn insurance and actually how it works. A lot of little details can go a long way with making sure claims get approved. This prevents having upset patients because the claim didn’t get approved. It’s also important to learn how to handle when those problems do come up because they will talk to you about it even if you’re the associate and have nothing to do with billing.

• Dr. Plasha

Stay humble keep learning, and pick the right location

Be humble enough to realize there’s a lot to learn and a lot you can learn. And whether it’s through conferences or networking or just reading articles, realize that you can learn stuff from everything. But to the other side of that, don’t assume just because someone’s been out longer than you that they know more than you. Some people haven’t pushed themselves in the last couple of decades. It’s not about comparing yourself to whoever is across town; it’s how we can be better and look at who else is around and who you can learn from. 

Pursue your goals no matter where you’re at because if you’re young and you’re ambitious and you want to learn, there’s a lot of opportunities out there in the right spot. Then again, I’m also really lucky that I’m in a town that isn’t competitive. If it was Southern California or Colorado where I used to practice, I wouldn’t own my own practice right now. So it’s also finding a place that you feel comfortable being, figuring out what goals are realistic, and you’ve got to make compromises in life. Just realizing you’re not better than anybody, but if you work hard you can be better than people who have been doing it a lot longer than you.

• Dr. Romine

Figure out what you enjoy doing and seek out mentors

The conditions on the ground for dental school grads has changed a lot over the past 20 years. In a nutshell, you could say it’s kind of the same as it is for college grads where the debt loads are very high for a lot of people and the market dynamics have changed quite a bit. So, I think like with anything – this could be for dentists, for graduates in any profession, or discipline – my advice would be:

1. As soon as you can (but don’t rush it), try to figure out what it is that you like doing. If you say you like dentistry or business, those are two very broad categories. Dentistry sounds like it’s pretty specific, but it’s actually quite broad. So figure out what it is that you like to do within dentistry. For example, think about what you like to do clinically – do you like doing extractions? Root canals? Etc. You don’t have to do everything. Figure out what you like doing so you can focus your efforts on that and really train yourself and specialize and refine. This will give you a lot more enjoyment in your day-to-day life. It will also help guide you in terms of what kind of day-to-day work you’re seeking out. Whether that’s practice ownership or whether you don’t necessarily want to go down that road and you want to do more of an associateship. I’ve done both, and they both have their merits. Let’s say you wanted to own a practice, but you know that clinically you want to do a, b, and c – but not d. I think you’d have more enjoyment being an associate, but doing the type of clinical stuff you want to do vs. being a practice owner where you have to do all the stuff that you don’t want to do.
2. Try to find good mentors. I was really fortunate that I had a lot of those built in. Find good mentors. You’re not necessarily going to copy them, but if you can pick out all the things that they do that you really find to be effective or in sync with how you do things, that’s going to give you an accelerated development process. You can get to that point of feeling very proficient in what you’re doing. That’s where it becomes a little less stressful and a lot more fun.

• Dr. Neish

Don’t fixate on the money and remember why you picked dentistry

Honestly, I can only really speak for myself, but I find that especially nowadays when you graduate school you are so fixated on the dollar amount of what you owe. I mean, you spent four years racking up all this debt. Everybody knows dental school’s not cheap by any means. So new dental school graduates tend to fixate so much on the money aspect, trying to make money and this and that. I would probably advise a new graduate to take a step back, and try not to focus on the money. The money will come. Rather, try to find an office that won’t make you compromise your ethics and values. 

Find somewhere where you can find the mentorship that will allow you to ultimately reach those goals because there are so many more important things than money. The money will eventually come, you just need to be patient about it and really focus on building your skills and your ethics. Working in an environment where you can foster relationships is important. This enables you to build that rapport and focus on all that. When you’re working in a high patient volume environment, you really don’t have the time to develop the social skills with patients. You just don’t. So, I think you lose a lot of that when you pick somewhere to go based on money. When you work in an environment like that for a couple years and then switch over to a private practice model, the patient interaction disconnect is very obvious and patients can feel it. 

And just remember to keep in mind why you went into the field to begin with. Most of us did this to help care for others and provide health care. Keep your purpose in mind and don’t let the other things cloud your judgment in pursuing certain jobs.

• Vivid Smiles Chicago

Conclusion

Venturing into the world of dentistry can be intimidating for new dental school graduates. If you find that you’re feeling overwhelmed by dental billing, patient scheduling, insurance verification, and other revenue cycle management needs, you can find help through eAssist. Our full suite of revenue cycle management services enables you and your staff to focus on patient care. Schedule a consultation today to learn more!