Dentistry is not a shorter medicine degree, and students who arrive expecting that struggle. The first two years are the same science backbone — anatomy, histology, physiology, biochemistry — but you carry a manual skills track alongside it from the start, in the simulation lab, on plastic teeth and phantom heads.
Years three to five move you onto real patients under supervision in the university's dental clinics: conservative dentistry and endodontics, prosthetics, periodontology, oral surgery, paediatric dentistry and orthodontics. By the end you have a treatment log, not just a transcript.
The honest part: your hands are examined, not only your memory. Nobody arrives good at this, and it is learned rather than innate, but it is a genuinely different kind of pressure from a medicine degree — and it is the thing to weigh up before you commit five years.
You graduate MDDr. — a dentist, licensed to treat, not a doctor who later chooses a specialty. That decision is made on the day you apply.