What are the best things about attending University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry?

One very appealing aspect of OUCOD is the early exposure to hands on skills. During your first full semester, you are in clinic every week working alongside third and fourth year students. During this time, you get to see how clinics inside the school work, are able to assist, and get up close and personal with procedures you will soon learn to do. During the spring semester, you do a lot more preclinical work including operative dentistry, learning to take x-rays, and learning other important skills like taking impressions. The summer going into your second year, you start seeing your very first patient for a cleaning. For me, this pace was exactly what I needed to learn new skills at a fast rate without being overwhelmed.

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What are the worst things about attending University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry?

This could an issue at every state and school, but everything is political, even in dental school. For example, receiving scholarships and such has a lot more to do with who you know than anything else. I dislike when medical school or pharmacology faculty come to the dental college and teach us using the same slides as the med/pharm students. The slides are very intense and rarely circle back to teach the specific impact or relevance for the practice of dentistry. The other issue is that they don’t coordinate with dental school faculty for test schedules, so we end up having multiple tests in one day which can be stressful. However, the med/pharm classes themselves are fairly well-organized. The didactic classes for dentistry tend to be less organized. Some classes have quizzes and assignments, but mainly your grades in didactic courses come from midterm and final exams only.

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What do students need to know/what do you wish you knew before attending University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry?

Students should know that OUCOD is a place where you will be supported and pushed to be your best. While this is probably true for most dental schools, there will be days or weeks when you will not feel worthy or good enough. I wish I would have known that was a normal feeling and its normal not be perfect on the first try or sometimes even the 10th try.

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