Career options for the dental graduate: report of a conference.

The unexpectedly high attendance (over five hundred) at the conference and the large number of individuals who had to be turned away provide proof that there is considerable interest in diverse dental careers. Interest is high not only among students and recent graduates: there were members of classes ranging from 1940 to 1985 in attendance. Another conference on the same topic in January in another region of the country also attests to the worthwhile information imparted by such a conference. Finally, it is safe to say that the dental degree has been too narrowly viewed in terms of its career potential, and that dental graduates believed, in the past, that they were prepared to do a very limited range of things. The conference established beyond doubt that it is possible to enter a variety of dentally related careers, either directly from dental school or after some period in private practice, and speakers offered concrete advice on how this might best be done. In a recent article on predoctoral dental education in the 1980s, Dr. Louis Terkla made the basic assumption that, in the future, "schools of dentistry will revise their practice planning courses to orient and prepare graduating students to assume career roles other than as solo practitioners." The Conference on Career Options for the Dental Graduate subserved that goal.