The Importance of Shadowing

Hi everyone! My name is Judy Trinh and I’m a third-year Biology/Pre-Dent major here at UT.  As a pre-dental student, along with all other pre-health students, shadowing a practitioner from your chosen field is an imperative component of your undergraduate career. Sometimes you may think you have a good idea of what your future profession will entail, until you get there and see first-hand how things really are on a day-to-day basis– and what you see may or may not match your expectations! Shadowing can give you the chance to better confirm to yourself that this is the path that you really want to take, and the earlier you start, the better. As a testimony, I used to be Pre-Med/Pre-PA for my first two years at UT- I was dead set on becoming a doctor/PA and nothing would change my mind. The previous summer I had the chance to shadow a PA for the first time…only to grudgingly admit to myself at the end of the summer that medicine was far from what I wanted to do. In contrast, I shadowed a general dentist, and only took a few visits to realize that I loved it! I felt energized by the interactive nature of dentistry. I loved how much more patient interaction it allowed, and how my dentist was able to form lasting relationships with her patients.  I also appreciated the artistic aspects of it all, and how you can work directly/physically with your patients. This may be all common knowledge about dentistry of course, but actually being there made the difference for me.  Medicine may be great for other people, but it was way too monotonous for me. It’s been a semester now of me consistently shadowing dentists, and I couldn’t be any happier that I’ve made the switch. With that being said, shadowing may be an intimidating thing to initiate for many students, so I’ll be writing a series of blog posts how to get started, and some tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way, so please look out for my posts!

Thanks for reading, guys!