Blogging Through Dental School

[JamesOSU]

Edit ...

I've decided not to make it my personal blog, but work on a blog that will host a group of writers from different schools and years in schools to hopefully become a resource as rich as the likes of SDN and PreDents...

More to come in the coming week(s) when I will be looking for writers.

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[hoss19]

there are so many med school blogs because they have so much more free time on their hands...hahahaha

i am thinking about doing one but i already do one about my triathlon training and i barely make enough time to do that. and im not even in dschool yet. maybe i'll combine the two topics on dental school and triathlon into one blog....

also, check out www.dmdstudent.com that is one that i referenced during the app process...

 

[JamesOSU]

We can do better - I've got something in the works, hopefully I'll be back in around a week to start finding people to make it work with. Exciting stuff

 

[Lopyswine]

there are tons of dental school blogs. nothing new.

 

[leoele]

We can do better - I've got something in the works, hopefully I'll be back in around a week to start finding people to make it work with. Exciting stuff

If you're going to use blogger, I'd be a contributor.

 

[USUaggie]

I'm not sure what the original post was (before the edit) but I recently started this blog dedicated to interesting dental news - but not like news only dentists would be interested in (like Lopywine said, there are tons of them already). Mine is about interesting/funny/amusing news stories that involve the field of dentistry. I looked all over to make sure it hadn't already been done and I couldn't find another site like mine.

Anyway, check it out let me know what you think. Feel free to link to me and I'll link back when you're up and running.

 

[JamesOSU]

there are tons of dental school blogs. nothing new.

Some examples... besides DMDstudent.com which is hideous

 

[JamesOSU]

If you're going to use blogger, I'd be a contributor.

It will be run on Wordpress

 

[PDizzle]

Some examples... besides DMDstudent.com which is hideous

That's a little harsh

 

[hoss19]

I'm not sure what the original post was (before the edit) but I recently started this blog dedicated to interesting dental news - but not like news only dentists would be interested in (like Lopywine said, there are tons of them already). Mine is about interesting/funny/amusing news stories that involve the field of dentistry. I looked all over to make sure it hadn't already been done and I couldn't find another site like mine.

Anyway, check it out let me know what you think. Feel free to link to me and I'll link back when you're up and running.

hey aggie, just ran through your blog. FUNNY! You got some great material on there, not sure where you get it, but keep up the good work!

 

[JamesOSU]

hehe ninjas... always being sneaky.

My idea, which will takes weeks at this point to set up (i'm a bit busy and setting up a site like this is time consuming - I'm sure Dizz knows too well) is simple:

Have a site with maybe ~10 contributing authors, all dental students of different years and from different schools, to give more viewpoints. Each author would hopefully be able to write 2 posts per month about dental school experiences, what they're working on (pre-clinical, clinical) - pictures a plus! As well as how they prepared for the DATs, dental school, the boards, starting a practice, applying for residencies, etc, etc. The site would have biographies of the 10 authors, which I'm sure during the year would change, adding some new writers others leaving, all the better with the variety on the site. Latest dentistry news could also be posted, as well as links (hopefully!) to Dizz's Predents and SDN and other sites like this.

It will be a great resource for those interested in or attending dental school, and once up the archives will be a gold mine for those hunting for more first-person information.

I would hope to have it up and pumping out articles before the beginning of next cycle, hoping a few months before that (so March-ish). Until then I'll be working on the back-end of the website, learning as I go, and then I'll come back here to look for contributing writers that are interested.

 

[PDizzle]

hehe ninjas... always being sneaky.

My idea, which will takes weeks at this point to set up (i'm a bit busy and setting up a site like this is time consuming - I'm sure Dizz knows too well) is simple:

Have a site with maybe ~10 contributing authors, all dental students of different years and from different schools, to give more viewpoints. Each author would hopefully be able to write 2 posts per month about dental school experiences, what they're working on (pre-clinical, clinical) - pictures a plus! As well as how they prepared for the DATs, dental school, the boards, starting a practice, applying for residencies, etc, etc. The site would have biographies of the 10 authors, which I'm sure during the year would change, adding some new writers others leaving, all the better with the variety on the site. Latest dentistry news could also be posted, as well as links (hopefully!) to Dizz's Predents and SDN and other sites like this.

It will be a great resource for those interested in or attending dental school, and once up the archives will be a gold mine for those hunting for more first-person information.

I would hope to have it up and pumping out articles before the beginning of next cycle, hoping a few months before that (so March-ish). Until then I'll be working on the back-end of the website, learning as I go, and then I'll come back here to look for contributing writers that are interested.

That's an interesting idea. My advice (not like you asked for it, but..) is to:

1) Definitely have multimedia!! Photos are a must. Consider short video clips as well. Everyone and their Mother has phones that can capture 30 sec of video!

2) 10 contributers?? Think bigger my friend! Try to get at least one from each school so people can can read the D-Blog (Just made that up) from the school they are interested in. Everyone blogs! 9 year olds have blogs! So I don't think it will be too tough to find one from each school. Use SDN to full advantage but try to become a partner first, then you can openly post about your site. PreDents.com would be nothing without SDN.

3) Make it as user friendly for the authors and viewers as much as humanly possible. For the viewers, have good search functions so they can get what they want, quick. Have them be able to sign up and get auto email notify with a new article, things like that (nothing novel here, but bad if you don't have it)

4) Start thinking about security and content control now, before you code your first character! I made some mistakes and left big holes in my code when making PreDents. It's harder to fix down the road.

5) Make it pretty..

BTW, what language you use? You free code or do you use an auth tool? Where you gonna host it?


Dizz

 

[sks2286]

Hey I would be willing to be a writer. If all goes right, Ill be at Michigan next year.

 

[SugarNaCl]

I had this grand plan to blog my way through dental school writing down my experiences... it took 2 weeks before I realized that I simply had NO TIME to keep up a blog... even a simple one. I never in a million years thought that dental school would keep me THIS busy. Then when I have free time about 3 weeks later, I have forgotten half of the things I wanted to write so I never got around to it and probably never will. Kudos to you for trying to make it work.

 

[USUaggie]

I had this grand plan to blog my way through dental school writing down my experiences... it took 2 weeks before I realized that I simply had NO TIME to keep up a blog... even a simple one. I never in a million years thought that dental school would keep me THIS busy. Then when I have free time about 3 weeks later, I have forgotten half of the things I wanted to write so I never got around to it and probably never will. Kudos to you for trying to make it work.

I agree, the time I've put into my personal blog this year wasn't available to me my first couple of years of dental school, but I wish I would have started one just to jot down the funny things that happen. Even if it was just a couple paragraphs every two weeks, it's something.

 

[USUaggie]

hey aggie, just ran through your blog. FUNNY! You got some great material on there, not sure where you get it, but keep up the good work!

Thanks! I'm glad you like it. I guess you could say I'm sort of a news junkie and there's usually about one or two interesting dental-related news items out there each week.

 

[JamesOSU]

Thanks for advice Dizz

My good buddy is a fantastic wordpress designer and has coder and has passed some knowledge onto me. I have a basic understanding of php and will be learning the wordpress function codes over the next couple of weeks. Wordpress makes it very easy to post pictures, though I'll have to look into video.

Having that many posters is a great idea, I just didn't think I would be able to do it, and setting up that many blogs could just get ridiculous - but I will definately consider it and try to implement as much as possible. In regards to the timing issue, that was why I would hope for around 2 posts /month, with that many writers the blog could still have around 1 post a day to keep people entertained.

The writers would not be able to publish anything first, it would all be saved as drafts, that way I could publish them individually, so one day there aren't 13 new posts and then nothing for a week. It would also let the writers write 4 posts at once and not touch it for awhile, as well as give me and maybe some other people editorial control, picture resizing and styling, etc etc.

I've just registered the domain and purchased hosting for www.StudentDentists.com - you can check back at that through the next few months, but don't expect to much until at least this weekend - I will be doing a lot of research before I actually start trying to code it.

Any other advice/ideas? I think this could become a really cool community - we've already got a great pre-dental and dental base here on SDN.