Blog: Using social media to connect with other dental students and applicants

My aim with my page has always been to help as many people as I can including dental applicants and other dental students like myself. At first, I made posts aimed towards dental applicants including tips for interviews and why I chose Sheffield. As I got more confident in the formatting, I started to make revision posts such as a summary on each medical emergency and how to manage them and helpful mnemonics for anatomy.

Creating these posts was a great way for me to refresh my knowledge of important topics from previous years and to stay up to date with the latest guidelines. Nearer to exam time I enjoy making quizzes on different topics to aid my own revision and to help others too.

My page has also allowed me to connect with dentists from around the world and learn from them which I find very beneficial for my learning. I even made a collaboration with some successful Instagram dentists about advice they wish they knew when they were in dental school. This was very successful, and I learned a lot from all of their wisdom!

Having my dental page has brought me a lot of opportunities that I do not think I would have otherwise known about or had the courage to apply for. I help create revision posts and quizzes for Dentinal Tubules on various topics including exodontia and the different types of crowns. Again, this really helped me to reinforce my knowledge of
the topics and it helped me to develop my teamwork skills by working with other dental students from across the country.

While making revision posts I began to realise how much I enjoyed teaching and helping other people and I decided to apply for the SUDSS education secretary. I got the role and held our first revision session recently for the first years. We ran an anatomy crash course with kahoots for each topic and received lots of excellent feedback
from it! We are looking forward to running more sessions after our exams, particularly for the Integrated Human Diseases course for third years.

I also recently became an ambassador for Kaizen Dental which is two young dentists who send clinical tips straight to your inbox! Their goal is to inspire and encourage you to carry out high quality dentistry by sharing tips, tricks and guides for free. I’m part of the poster team so I have used my experience of making posts on both my page and for Dentinal Tubules to convert the clinical tips into posters.