At A Smile 4 U Career Center, our goal is to ensure that, once you leave our facilities, you are fully educated and prepared to be a successful dental assistant. This means that our coursework includes not just classroom instruction, but practical, hands-on experience in a real dental office as well.
Dental Assistant Training
Dental assistant training takes place over the course of eight weeks (including 144 hours of instruction). Our class schedule is easy to fit into your everyday lifestyle, so even as you continue in your current career as you are preparing for a new one or are taking care of your family, you’ll receive instruction in all the basic areas of dentistry, such as oral surgery and IV sedation, endodontics, and both adult and pediatric dentistry. Your learning environments will include a lecture, lab, clinical area for more hands-on instruction, and a working dental office. Following classroom instruction, you’ll begin a 32-hour externship to work in an actual practice before you are awarded a Certificate of Completion.
Practicing in a Real Dental Environment
While there are some things that can be studied only in theory, dentistry must be practiced and experienced first-hand. We want you to be fully ready for your first day on the job. If you’ve never touched an instrument or been in the back of a dental office, you most likely would feel very anxious and unprepared, and your success as a dental assistant would be harder to achieve.
Our hands-on training gives you access to touch and feel everything you would encounter in a real dentist’s office so that you’ll know how to work all the equipment and have a general idea of how to find your way around. After practicing basic skills with dental tools with your classmates, you’ll be able to assist a dentist with a live patient in a real dental procedure. This not only prepares you for assisting during procedures on a daily basis but also gives you an idea of what is expected of you when working alongside a dentist, building your confidence to be a great dental assistant.
