Abstract
BackgroundIn the last three decades there is a growing recognition in the dental profession that dental education must go beyond teaching the technicalities of dentistry and include professionalism and communication skills that the future dentist may need. Such skills are best taught in a student-centered way. Literature suggests that student-centered elements are difficult to introduce in traditional, teacher-centered curricula. This is especially true in post-communist countries where higher education was under strict state control for decades. The aim of the piece of research presented here was to investigate how difficult it is to introduce a student-centered career skills course in a traditionally teacher-centered dental curriculum.MethodsConsidering the needs of our final-year dental students and Super’s model of career development, we created an undergraduate curricular career skills course running for two semesters in two languages (Hungarian and English). The primary aim of the course is to help students with their career expectations and develop their identity as a professional workforce. The secondary aim is to teach skills that students can use when applying for a job. At the end of the semesters, we assessed our students’ satisfaction with various aspects of the course by using a questionnaire. Results were analyzed item-wise and according to the main aspects of the course (i.e., groups of items organized around a particular aspect).ResultsGeneral satisfaction with the course was high, and practical skills training (such as CV and motivation letter writing) got the highest scores. From the answers it appears that the students were the least comfortable with having to deal with their personal values and preferences.ConclusionsWhile it is common for universities to offer various forms of career intervention, to our knowledge, no other university offers a curricular career skills course specifically for dental students. Our student-centered course designed in a problem-based learning framework worked even in a traditionally teacher-centered educational environment, where university students are rarely encouraged to be active participants in courses. By sharing our experience, we would like to encourage our fellow dental educators working in similar environments to devise and offer such courses.
Highlights
Introduction to the Macy study reportJ Dent Educ. 2008;72(2 Suppl):5–9. 2
What we present here is a curricular career intervention course for senior (5th -year) students that we introduced into the undergraduate dental curriculum at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Szeged, Hungary in the academic year 2017/2018
Standard deviations were low with two notable exceptions, item #10 (4.03 ± 1.197) and item # 16 (3.77 ± 1.459). These items ask the respondent about the perceived effect of feedback on the simulated interview and if he/she has found a potential employer during the job fair, respectively
Summary
Introduction to the Macy study reportJ Dent Educ. 2008;72(2 Suppl):5–9. 2. In the last three decades there is a growing recognition in the dental profession that dental education must go beyond teaching the technicalities of dentistry and include professionalism and communication skills that the future dentist may need. Such skills are best taught in a student-centered way. As Myers and Myers summarized, ‘It’s difficult being a dentist’ [2] This is partly because of the plethora of health hazards [3,4,5,6,7], and because of the difficulties in balancing work and family [8] and the fact that dentists need to be competent in non-medical aspects of their practice, such as financial planning, addressing legal issues, personal time management, or practice organization. Dealing with the non-strictly professional challenges of dentistry, requires certain ‘soft’ skills (e.g. communication, knowledge of one’s self, etc.) that cannot be taught in a teacher-centered framework
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