Perceptions and challenges of a first-year dental student – A cross-sectional study

Abstract

Introduction: Undergraduate dental training is demanding and rigorous, unaware students face a lot of challenges after entering the course. Thus, the study aims to find out from a dental sophomore the challenges they face during the first year of dental school. Methodology: An e-questionnaire study was conducted on 932 second-year Bachelor of Dental Surgery students of India. The questions help us gauge problems and hurdles faced by a dental sophomore like information related to difficulty levels, laborious nature and so on. Chi-square test is to find out relativity and association between the variables. Results: Pre-clinical prosthodontics was found the most laborious and a gender-wise significant difference (P < 0.01) was noted amongst females (437, 71.06%) and males (157, 49.53%). Conclusion: This study highlighted that students are usually unaware about the course, the type of content reading, learning, laborious nature of practical work and so on.

Keywords

• awareness
• career
• dental
• dentistry
• perception
• students