6:59 AM.
Your laptop is balanced on the edge of your bed. The hostel curtains are still drawn, filtering in that dim grey morning light. You’ve already copied the Zoom link into your sticky notes — because there’s no way you’re fumbling through the group chat this early.
7:00 AM — click. Camera off. Mic muted. One hand still clutching your blanket, the other lazily hovering over the trackpad. The lecturer’s voice crackles faintly through your earphones — a monotone soundtrack to the soft hum of your fan. Your eyelids get heavier…
Then — BZZZ! BZZZ! Your phone lights up.
WAKE UP!! They’re calling your number!!
Your pulse spikes. You grab the mouse, unmute, and rasp, “Yes, ma’am,” still half-asleep. You admit you don’t know the answer. She sighs, moves on for the next victim. You mute again, lie back down, and wonder how many more years this will go on.
Months later, the air smells like Dettol in the hostel corridors. We’re back. Our steps echo against the cold tile floor as we walk toward the clinic in our freshly ironed white coats. Our eyes dart around, hopeful for real cases.
Instead, we’re told: scaling and checkups only.
Our seniors are drowning in incomplete quotas, and they need every patient who walks through the door. We wait in the cubicles, gloves on, masks fitted, listening to the muffled chatter of instruments clinking from their side of the room.
The lecture hall becomes our new clinic. There’s that one lecturer whose footsteps down the aisle make everyone sit up straighter. We huddle in the back row, notes sprawled across the desks.
“Roll number 36?” he calls.
Textbooks flip open so fast it’s like shuffling cards. Fingers point to lines, whispers hiss answers across the row. Sometimes you save your friend. Sometimes you watch them take the fall.
Year 4 hits fast. Suddenly, quotas aren’t a distant worry — they’re the worry. Patients are scarce, and every single one counts. That’s when we turn into dental salespeople without even meaning to.
You’re in an Uber, watching the meter tick up, and casually drop, “By the way, have you ever had a dental checkup?”
You’re buying lunch, and as the canteen worker hands you change, you slip in, “We do free scaling at the college clinic.”
Even at a police roadblock, you find yourself smiling under your mask: “Sir, you should come in for a dental check.”
We start seeing everyone as a potential patient — friends of friends, random acquaintances, that aunty at the grocery store who only wanted bananas.
Year 5 doesn’t stroll in — it sprints.
The air smells like gloves and mouthwash in clinic. The sound of suction machines blends with the sharp snap of gloves as we move from one patient to the next. Between appointments, we’re in the library, pages rustling, highlighters squeaking, the air stale from too many late nights.
We’re cramming everything from year 3 to 5 into our brains for finals. Our schedules are chaos — one hour extracting a molar, the next frantically revising Grossman -Pathway to pulp. Some nights, you fall asleep on top of open textbook pages, hoping for some diffusion to happen overnight.
And then one day, it’s over. We’ve ticked every quota, survived every viva, and worn our gloves until our hands smelled permanently of latex. We line up for that final batch photo, coats pristine, faces tired but proud.
The road from Zoom naps to quota chases was long, messy, and full of Wi-Fi excuses — but we made it. And that, in itself, is the story I’ll carry into every patient interaction for the rest of my career.
