So, Virtualmaster999 sent me some questions and we agreed to share the Q and A with everybody else.
-So what drew you to MWU specifically? Like what makes it stand out from the other schools you applied to? Specific features, programs, etc.
1. Friendly and happy staff and students. You can definitely feel how friendly and happy they are at the interview. Everyone was very easy to talk to and all of them seems to be very enthusiastic about the school. Yes, other schools I interviewed at displayed similar friendliness, but imho, MWU-IL showed the most genuine excitement about the school.
2. State of the art technology, seriously!! They also have really good looking clinic. It is damn nice.
3. Low student : staff ratio. It is about 6:1, especially true for DENT courses
4. There is no specialty program, meaning: we get to work with more procedures, because we are not competing with specialty students to find patients.
5. Being a school with different health disciplines, they can offer interprofessional study.
6. I love the 4 seasons they have in midwest.
7. Downers Grove is a good place to stay. It's close enough to Chicago, but far enough to be away from the traffic and other distractions. In addition, the living cost is relatively cheap (especially when compared to places like LA and NY).
8. Even though it is a new program, I have the confidence that they will be great. I really think that they have what it takes to be successful.
-How is the curriculum?
We have 2 main courses at any point throughout the first and second year (not sure about 3rd and 4th)=IBSS and DENT. They do a spiral approach, especially in DENT; they will come back to the same material, but with more depth (e.g.: They will teach endo in the first year and will come back to endo on the second year, but with more stuff in it).
IBSS is neat, because it is focused on a certain material and the format is pretty much the same every time; it is predictable, no funny businesses. IBSS courses cover what you need to know for the board exam.
-How is the clinical experience? When can you get started on doing clinical experience, and what kind of things do you get to do initially?
I haven’t had any clinical experience as of now, but I will have it soon, starting in the winter/ spring. We will be paired up with 2 D4s, making it a team of 4 (2 D3s and 2 D4s). We will be working together on patients and will divide the dental works among us. I am not sure about the details, but everybody I've been talking to do not express much complains about how they do it at the clinic. Here’s a quick look at our clinic:
-What's been the best/hardest part about dental school (maybe even specifically to MWU)?
The hardest part would be the large amount of materials we have to learn in short amount of time. For instance: what we learned in undergrad for 2 semesters will now be covered in 2 weeks. Luckily, most of the exam material is something we have seen in the past. But, that doesn’t make it easy.
Also, public transportation is not the best in this area. So, if you don’t have any means of transportation, you better wish you have friends with cars lol.
-What ways can you get involved on campus? Any popular organizations?
There are a lot of cool organizations in the campus. Two of the most popular ones are ASDA (American Student Dental Association) and DSD (Delta Sigma Delta; dental fraternity).
We are proud to say that we have the vice president of the nation-wide ASDA in our school (that’s kind of a big deal!
https://www.asdanet.org/trustees/). One of the things ASDA does is “protecting” our profession. For instance, they are now proposing some changes in licensure policies. We’re not there yet, but after a 60-years battle, we are pretty close on getting it done.
DSD is a really cool dental fraternity too (I’m not a part of it, but I’m considering in joining). One thing they did just recently is this mission trip to Dominican Republic: Here is a video of the trip last year (not the recent one)
