My name is Ai Lin Sun and I am a first-year Dentistry student at RCSI, part of its very first cohort – which still feels a little surreal to say.

If you had asked me this time last year what a typical day would look like, I probably would have pictured neat schedules, calm clinics and maybe a manageable caffeine habit. Right now, I would say it is a little more chaotic, a lot more demanding, but infinitely more rewarding.

Coming straight from the Leaving Certificate, I knew the Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) course would not be easy. What I did not fully appreciate was just how quickly you are expected to grow – not just academically, but professionally. The days are long, the learning curve is steep and coffee has become less of a choice and more of a personality trait. There is something deeply satisfying about seeing yourself inch closer, day by day, to the kind of clinician you hope to become.

Recently, things have taken an exciting turn: we have started clinics. After months of lectures, anatomy labs and hours spent working on phantom heads, stepping into a real clinical setting feels like crossing an invisible threshold. Today was my second clinic day – a Wednesday ritual that now anchors our weeks. Most of our first year has been based in the Sandyford Dental Education Centre, apart from the initial six-week whirlwind of anatomy labs in the St Stephen's Green campus in town. The commute is kind to me. Living near the city centre campus means I can hop on the Green Line Luas (a crucial detail: get off at Stillorgan, not Sandyford) and be there in about 20 minutes. It is a small pocket of calm before the day begins.

Clinic sessions run in two shifts and I was on the morning one: 8:30 to 15:30. Today, I was the dentist – still an intimidating sentence to write, even now. With my peer nurse and under the guidance of our clinical supervisors, I saw two patients. We carried out full examinations – extra- and intra-oral, dental charting and treatment planning – before I provided fluoride varnish and fissure sealants. It might sound routine, but there is nothing routine about the first time you realise you can actually do this for a patient. It is the kind of learning that no lecture can replicate. Around midday, we had a short break. As Chair of the Dentistry Society, I squeezed in a committee meeting – end-of-year and handover plans do not organise themselves – before heading back to clinic to finish the session. By the time we wrapped up, I had that familiar mix of exhaustion and quiet satisfaction.

I am also studying a Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Trinity College, so my day did not end until after a two-hour piano class across the city. There is something grounding about moving from the precision of dentistry to the expressiveness of music – it is like switching languages but still speaking the same truth. By the time I got home, it had been a very long day. And right now, here I am, writing this – because days like these, however intense, are the ones that feel worth remembering.

Our days tend to fall into three broad categories: lecture days, SDLE days and now clinic days. Lecture days (usually Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays) are far less intimidating than they were in Semester 1 – no longer 9-to-5 marathons. Mondays are anchored by Enquiry Based Learning (EBL) sessions, where we apply lecture material to clinical cases and start thinking like dentists rather than just students. Tuesdays are reserved for SDLE – the Simulated Dental Learning Environment – where we spend the day working on phantom heads. It is meticulous, sometimes frustrating work, but it is also where confidence quietly builds, hour by hour, week by week. Looking ahead, the course is designed to become increasingly clinic focused, with new community-based dental education centres opening in places like Blanchardstown and Ashtown. The goal is simple but powerful: make care more accessible and, in doing so, shape us into clinicians who are not just technically competent but socially aware.

One of the best parts of this programme is the people. There are only 31 of us in the year, which means you cannot really fade into the background – and you would not want to. We come from all sorts of paths: some straight from the Leaving Certificate, others after different degrees and a strong international cohort bringing perspectives from Canada, the US and beyond. Somehow, it works. We have become a genuinely close-knit group, the kind that celebrates the wins, survives the stress and inevitably ends up sharing pizzas after exams. Dentistry is intense – there is no way around that. But having people alongside you who understand exactly what that intensity feels like makes all the difference.

So, that is a snapshot of a Wednesday in my life. It is busy, occasionally overwhelming and rarely predictable – but it is also full of small, meaningful moments that remind me why I chose the RCSI BDS path in the first place.