Obviously because it is my school! But there are also reasons behind why I am so proud to call CU my home. I honestly think that CU is one of the top schools in the country and I will list here several key points to support my statement.
1) New, modern facility: comparing to other medical campus in the country, our campus is fairly new. The whole campus was built around building 500 which used to be the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center where President Eisenhower was hospitalized for several weeks. The Eisenhower suite is still there on the 8th floor although it is not open for public. With that much history, however the first medical school lab was relocated here not until 2004 and later joined by other academic schools in 2008. With only 10 years in operation, there is no doubt that the campus still looks gorgeous with the design built to emphasize open air and nature. The dental school itself is a 4-storage building with a big basement where students can hang out or even stay overnight and sleep there if one chooses to. The clinic was equipped with x-ray machine, nitrous oxide or laughing gas, microscope for endo chairs, CAD/CAM system, etc. I love looking out from those big windows around the clinic and enjoying the beautiful greenery outside ( that helped a lot when I took the board exam as I could distract my worried mind while waiting for my patients) The library in the campus is one of the best I’ve visited so far. It has so many study rooms that you can choose with vending machines, coffee vending machine, sleeping pods ready whenever you need a break. Oh I should mention that they have treadmills in all corners so you can study and exercise at the same time.
From the 4th floor clinic's window
Winter is beautiful here
Me at the end of the 1st semester
The waiting area at the dental building
2) Patient pool: also comparing to other dental schools, we have a decent patient pool here as we are the only dental school in the state and patients love us (well at least I hope so). My first year here I felt like I didn’t have enough patients. The only reason why this happened is because we didn’t have as much clinic sessions as the senior students. Our schedule was packed with didactic classes, labs, rotations, assisting session and we were also new to the clinic so they didn’t want to overwhelm us too much. By fall semester of the 1st year to 2nd year, at some point I was panicked (kinda) as I had more patients than I could handle and I wondered which patient I should prioritize and which patient I would have to let them wait. It’s not that students here don’t struggle with patient pool as some patients are simply not cooperative or maybe just not able to keep up with appointments due to certain difficulties. That means you may finish your graduation requirements early or last minutes depending on your luck with patients, but we all will finish requirements and graduate. You just need to keep the school updated on your requirements often and ask for help as needed. They also have several great programs that provide free treatment to qualified veterans (Heroes clinic) or seniors (Senior Smiles program) to increase patient flow for students as well. I have way more patients during my 1.5 year in the clinic here than during my dental school time in home country.
3) The people: no environment can be good without good people in it no matter how awesome the place looks like.
- The faculties: they are awesome. It’s that simple. We have learned so much from them not only clinical skill but also management skill, lifestyle, knowledge, personality you name it. It’s not rare to see students talking to a faculty during their short lunch break. You can even see a schedule in front of a faculty’s office door like this
“12 - 12.30: student A.
12:30 - 1: student B.
5 - 7: study club - 4th floor clinic”
just so you know which day he is still available to schedule a meeting with him during lunch. I wonder when they will eat or maybe they don’t need to at all as they are all superhuman. For some other faculties, they prefer early morning such as “See me in my office at 7am” when you want to discuss about a case. I think I wake up later than all of my faculties (and I am not proud about this but my excuse is because I live right at the campus hehe). There is a joke that pros faculties will have students following them to even restrooms to discuss or get consultation. We are encouraged to share with other students and faculties about something not-dentistry-relevant as after credits during our case presentation. It can be either family photos, short clips about our culture/countries or just whatever we want to share. They say that everyday there are so many things to learn about and if you only care about dentistry, you are missing out on something very important.
- The staff: they go beyond to help you. From the finance, the front desk, the lab personnel, to the dispensary personnel, they all are very helpful and supportive. You will find us joke around at the school or even hang out after school. I still feel so grateful for their help during the board exam. We were lucky to have it at our base and more importantly to have all the support we needed. They kept stocking up all the supplies so we had everything we needed to practice. They stayed after hour to help us with board screening and that’s all volunteer. I remember how the radiology personnel stayed all day to help us mounting radiographs for the endo exam just so we could finish it on-time and I believe not many schools out there or even none offers this much help. The board exam was stressful, but I felt relaxing a bit whenever I saw them around as I knew they got my back if I ever needed something.
- The school (policy): One of the faculties told us the reason the school doesn’t charge us extra for typodont teeth or burs is because they all believe that the only way students can thrive is to practice more. They don’t charge us so we are not hesitant to practice as much as possible. You may feel like $2 for a tooth or a bur is not too much. Well, we had to submit about 35 prep teeth for one of the lab courses, plus 35 extra-credit, plus a lot of teeth we prepped ( or destroyed) in between let alone all the burs we used. That would be like several hundred right there. Oh and the board again (it’s the most important event in dental schools for sure so I keep talking about this). One of my friends had to fly to another dental school for board exam as we don’t have that exam here. She was so jealous and sad when she heard that we had breakfast/lunch/early dinner at the school. They treated us (and our patients) with more than enough food, beverages, fruit, etc . We had bagels for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch/dinner, coffee, sodas, teas, fruits all 2.5 days. Over there my friend didn’t even have water and her husband had to go outside to buy some water and food for her.
As our program director often says, there is always some room for improvement. For sure there is no perfect school or program but for me all of the good things here outweigh whatever they are not good yet. Maybe the risk of bias in this article is high, but I don’t really care as I will forever proudly call my school as one of the best dental schools in the country.