In 1918, Dent joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough, Hampshire. The First World War opened new employment opportunities for women, and RAE was one of the first military establishments to recruit women into engineering, and mathematical and computational research. In the same period that Dent was at RAE, Lorna Swain, then mathematics tutor at Newnham College in the University of Cambridge, worked at the establishment on the problem of aircraft propeller vibration. The Treasury reduced RAE's funding after the end of the war, and consequently, the number of resources and staff available to support research fell significantly. In 1919, she left RAE after being accepted on to the general Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree course at the University of Bristol. In June 1920, she passed her intermediate examination in French with supplementary courses in Latin, history, and mathematics.
In the following academic year, Dent joined the honours course in mathematics and took an intermediate examination in physics. After spending the summer of 1921 at her parents home in Warminster, she returned for the start of the 1921 to 1922 academic year to find that Paul Dirac had joined the mathematics course. The course of mathematics at Bristol University normally lasted three years, but because of Diracs previous training, the Department of Mathematics had allowed him to join in the second year. They were taught applied mathematics by Henry Ronald Hassé, the then head of the Mathematics Department, and pure mathematics by Peter Fraser. Both of them had come from Cambridge; Fraser had been appointed in 1906 to the staff of the Bristol University College, soon to become the University of Bristol, and Hassé joined him in 1919 as professor of mathematics. Fraser introduced them to mathematical rigour, projective geometry, and rigorous proofs in differential and integral calculus. Dirac would later say that Peter Fraser was "the best teacher he had ever had."
Dent studied four courses in pure mathematics:
There was a choice of specialisation in the final year; applied or pure mathematics. As the only official, registered feepaying student, Dent had the right to choose, and she settled on applied mathematics for the final year. The department could offer only one set of lectures so Dirac also had to follow the same course. Dent studied four courses in applied mathematics: