When you come in to the University of Louisville Dental School, it's such a family environment.
The faculty and the staff are always super welcoming, very warm, friendly, always supportive.
It's a build each other up atmosphere, big focus on being positive.
Dental school epitomizes all of the sort of Cardinal principles that the university has. I think we're very caring people orientated. We treat our students as colleagues. We try to make them feel at home. They usually come from a broad background, very diverse from all over the country. And we want to make them part of our family. We have a very prestigious medical school Nursing School of Public Health school. So when you come in, you're immediately surrounded by like minded professionals.
You have the opportunity to interact with people in different specialties.
I really love the atmosphere and energy positive environment that Louisville has, especially in the clinics, and that's what sold it for me.
I love all 120 students in my class. I know all of their first names, last names, if they have children, their dog's names. I feel like we're one big family.
They have a recently renovated building, which is state of the art-- They have the latest technology,
I'm so wowed by just how nice it was .
The clinics beautiful, you have nice equipment, faculty that cares about you, wants you to learn.
Our goal is to be at the forefront and we've invested heavily in that as a strategic priority.
We have like 3D printers downstairs. We got the oral scanners. We got the CBCT that we can do here for our patients, not a lot of places have that.
The faculty here at ULSD are some of the most approachable faculty have ever experienced in my entire life.
I feel that I can go to my faculty at any point and tell them I need help.
Our team leaders, who are the people that our students interact with the most on a day to day basis, all had strong clinical backgrounds. They haven't been just academicians, they've talked to talk, and they've walked the walk.
D1 and D2 year are going to be a lot of classwork. You have to you have to build yourself up to working in the clinic and working on real patients.
So we're taking like biochemistry, physiology, anatomy. Starting your D2 year, it becomes a lot more lab based, you're doing a lot more lab work. So it's kind of the boot camp year before you start the clinic.
Third and fourth year, you do a lot of clinic and you're actually seeing patients. You're really getting that real life experience of working on a patient.
But one of the goals when I came here as Dean is to expand our patient base, and to increase our requirements for our students to do more things with patients so that when they graduate, they feel more comfortable in their skills, and they're more prepared for practice. And we deliberately encourage our students to go out on rotations and we have rotations that go to West Louisville. We have our students who go to our mission retreat at Redbird, which is in the very south east corner of Kentucky, and our students are oftentimes transformed. But experience.
Redbird is an incredible experience and what they do down there, just on their own is awesome.
It's really important to get that experience on real patients, and people that are willing to come in and get work done.
We want our students to be prepared for practice, we want them to also have the opportunities to see what other residences can offer in advanced training. And so we have all of the specialty areas represented here.
I really love Louisville, it gives me a place where I can still have all the beauty of Kentucky and the nature. I can get to see horses, if I drive 20 minutes one way, but I also get a more urban environment. And so you know, if I want to hang out downtown and being more of a city environment, I can do that too.
I'm really proud of the fact that we have a diverse student body we have a diverse faculty body. And our goal is to grow it.
I love that we're learning as like a group, as a cohort, and not just the students, but the faculty as well. We're just learning more about each other we're becoming more inclusive.
Students when they leave here feel like they've been well prepared technically, didactically, and academically, but also I think that they feel like that they have met their peers along the way. They have formed close friendships.
Come take a look. You'll be able to see just how close knit everyone is. How much support you really have here, and how at home I think you'll feel.
You're definitely going to become a better version of yourself here especially as a student doctor and a future Dentist.
