I'm not doing any of the CDT (ceramic dental technician) stuff just yet (though I get to start wax-ups next week! hooray!!), but I've been helping my boss work on a presentation for these big esthetic dentistry conferences in Germany and Poland. It's great, because I get to help design his presentation and the yearbook nerd in me is certainly rejoicing. I've been using (and trying to get better at) Photoshop and Illustrator.. Now if I could just figure out Lightroom..
As I've been helping him prep, I've begun to learn a lot about the ideas behind esthetic dentistry as well (I'll be spelling esthetic with an "e", so if that bothers you, I'm sorry.. lol). Dental students always tell me that school whizzes by you in a flash, and that when they get out of school, they barely feel ready to take on real patients, in a real practice. I've always wondered if there's enough time to develop a trained hand for the detailed work in dental school, and whether the curriculum trains your eye for esthetically pleasing work. Since my boss is a CDT, he focuses heavily on the artistic component of dentistry, and tells me that often times, dentists aren't even aware when there's an esthetic issue with the labwork because they haven't learned how to see these problems yet.
