Ours is a three-year CODA accredited program. The goal of our program is to train competent clinicians who are proficient in performing all periodontal procedures, including basic periodontal surgery, esthetic periodontal surgery, and implant therapy.
If your focus is clinic and becoming a clinically competent periodontist, I would suggest that our program is going to serve your needs and provide you what you want.
Your first year you'll be taking most of your classes that fulfill your master's degree. Second year is increasing the clinical time and becoming comfortable in the clinic and comfortable with procedures. We step up in third year to do the more complex procedures and more multidisciplinary type cases. In both second and third year, you're continuing to do your periodontal course work, which is our literature review.
Our residents are required to do research, and usually it's clinical research, which means they're in the clinic treating patients while also doing research. They're not in the lab. Now, this is important because once they're out in practice, this gives them the ability to critique the research articles that they're reading and actually use research with credibility.
We get tons and tons of patients from all different walks of life and with all different kind of conditions. You get a lot of experience dealing with a variety of periodontal conditions that you may not experience when you get out in private practice, but you will see in an urban area.
Our residents do a hospital anesthesia rotation where they do anywhere between 75 to 100 sedation cases before they come back to the clinic and start doing sedation on their own patients.
We work closely with the graduate prosthodontics program and they have a lot of the new scanning technologies and 3D printing technologies. We have a very collaborative culture that extends not just in our residency, but throughout the other residencies. I've had consults or treatment with patients that we share with the pediatric residency, the endodontic residency, the prosthodontic residency, orthodontics.
We train our residents to be leaders in all aspects of treatment, including driving complex treatment plans, while educating our referral base, which includes the dental students, referring docs, and our specialist colleagues.
I really like Louisville a lot. Louisville has been kind of similar to my hometown in California with a mix of the Chicago midwest southern vibe.
We want folks here who are ready to work hard, who put patients first and want to excel in whatever they're doing. The interview process not only gives us a chance to evaluate the candidates, but also a chance for the candidates to evaluate us, our program, talk to our faculty and residents and see if it's a good fit both ways.
I found Louisville to be one of the top programs in the country as far as clinical experience goes, and that was a big recommendation from some of my mentors back in Chicago at the dental school there. Since I've got here, since the interview, pretty much I've been happy with my experience and everything that I thought Louisville was it is.
Our program has produced excellent periodontists who are not only exceptionally successful in their practices, but are also leaders in our specialty and their communities. We have a very close-knit group of alumni who are very supportive of our program, and Louisville is a wonderful and affordable city to stay and train in.
