1) Are students and faculty supportive and easily approachable?
Yes. Almost everyone at our school has an open door policy. That said, there are gradations to each professor's approachability. Overall I have found our faculty very approachable. I have walked into our dean's office probably 5-6 times unannounced and he always makes time to chat. He also responds to emails sent over the weekend or when he's traveling. Most of the faculty is similarly approachable.
Our administrators listen to our feedback. I don't think faculty evaluations mean much at most schools, but they mean everything here. Faculty has been let go when they received too many bad evals or student complaints.
2) Are there any classes or clubs to help you learn about practice ownership?
Our school prides itself on providing courses that will help prepare you for practice ownership, but in my personal opinion these classes largely fall short of the mark. That said, we do have student-led clubs for starting a dental practice and a great network of practice owning former-students who make themselves available to current students. Richard Low, George Hariri, and Ike Urlich of the Shared Practices podcast are all recent grads of our program. We have a really strong culture of practice ownership at this school.
3) I only hear about the pros of MWU-AZ what are some cons (other than price)?
I am extremely happy with MWU-AZ. That said, there are certainly things that could improve, mostly on the pre-clinical side.
We take NBDE I after our first year and spend most of our time studying basic sciences. In my opinion, and I know of several classmates who share this opinion, our didactics could be stronger. Some of our classes feel watered-down. For example, our head & neck anatomy course didn't require any dissection, and we relied on prosected cadavers done by the DO students. Sometimes, they absolutely butchered critical structures we could have benefitted from seeing. But hey, some dental schools don't even touch cadavers at all, so it's all relative.
Our head & neck anatomy class is only 1 quarter in length, and I think it's easy to forget a lot of what we learn by the time we get to the clinic. I really wish we had the opportunity to do more anatomy once we get in the clinic, a review of head & neck structures would be extremely helpful then. I learned a lot more in undergraduate anatomy than I did in the MWU head & neck anatomy course.
That said, I have spoken to friends and students I've met at multiple conferences, and I am often surprised to learn that their didactics courses were even less demanding than ours are, especially some of the PBL schools. I expected dental school basic sciences to be way harder than my undergraduate courses, but they largely weren't. What made dental school difficult was the volume. Maybe that's how it is everywhere, I don't know. What I do know, is that medical students work harder in the basic science courses than we do. My wife is a physician and she often said that we have it too easy and questioned how much we were really learning from 300-400 Powerpoint slides before each exam.
Another problem, and I think almost every dental student in our program agrees about this, the dental exams we take during our 2nd year are terribly written. Some of the questions look like they were written by a broken robot. This can be extremely frustrating as it often seems that the scores you get don't reflect the amount of time you spent studying. It's my understanding that admin wants to fix this next year, but I don't know much about that.
Our school is really bureaucratic, which isn't really that big a deal unless you are in charge of a club. Having been on student council and ASDA, one of the most frustrating things at Midwestern is how long it takes to get anything approved by the administration (not the dental school admin, Midwestern University's administration).
If you are really into research or specialization then this is not the school for you. Our research is mostly limited to products research and small studies. We have a tiny research endowment and only one research faculty.
Phoenix is really hot during the summer, some people hate that, I personally don't mind.
That's about all I can come up with!
