94% of researchers rate our articles as excellent or good
Learn more about the work of our research integrity team to safeguard the quality of each article we publish.
Find out more
ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Dent. Med.
Sec. Systems Integration
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdmed.2025.1566272
This article is part of the Research TopicDental EducationView all 8 articles
Monitoring career impact and satisfaction in a graduate program in dentistry
Provisionally accepted
Isadora Rotta1
Fernando Valentim Bitencourt2
Fabricio Mezzomo Collares1
Roger Junges3*
Susana Maria Werner Samuel1Ramona Fernanda Ceriotti Toassi1
CASSIANO KUCHENBECKER ROSING1- 1Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
- 2Aarhus University, Aarhus, Central Denmark Region, Denmark
- 3University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The assessment of student outcomes is essential for monitoring the quality of graduate programs in healthcare sciences. As such, this study focused on developing a self-employed questionnaire that allowed for the evaluation of elements focused on career impact and levels of satisfaction regarding graduate program education, and utilized it in a cross-sectional study design with alumni that had obtained their degree (MSc or PhD) over a 25-year span (1995-2020) from a graduate program in dentistry located in Brazil. The employed instrument comprised a total of 40 questions presenting a mix of both close and open-ended questions coupled with 5-point Likert scales. The questionnaire was hosted online and a total of 528 alumni were invited to participate through e-mail and social media outreach. 376 alumni answered the questionnaire (71.2% response rate). The majority were female (69.9%), and with a MSc (58.5%). Levels of satisfaction towards the program as well the impact in career and life were higher in alumni that had obtained a PhD degree compared to MSc. After obtaining the degree, an increase in involvement in teaching/research positions (3.4% vs 21.5%, p<001) and a decrease in unemployment (21.9% vs 2.1%, p<001) were observed. The highest levels of impact were observed regarding the achievement of the professional goals as nearly 90% of the population agreed with this statement. This study highlighted the creation and employment of an assessment tool that can be utilized to monitor the perceptions of student outcomes. Among the findings, a decrease in unemployment and a high degree of career impact and satisfaction were observed in the population of this study. Moving forward, it is essential that monitoring educational outcomes remains a priority worldwide.
Keywords: Education, Graduate, Specialization, Education, Dental, Continuing, Clinical Competence, Education
Received: 24 Jan 2025; Accepted: 11 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Rotta, Bitencourt, Collares, Junges, Samuel, Toassi and ROSING. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Roger Junges, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.