I'm a DS4 there now and I can tell you the school is vastly different than it was even a year ago. Everyone is very friendly and things have improved a great deal. The administration is extremely student-friendly and always does their best to consider the student's feelings and requests and makes every effort to ensure a positive environment. Didactic curriculum has evolved even since I started a few years ago, and changes are being made based on student feedback each semester.
As for clinic, we now have PSCs (Patient Service Coordinators) that schedule our patients and keep our schedules full rather than booking them ourselves. As a DS4, we work in a "comprehensive care" environment where we can do virtually any discipline any day as well as mixing disciplines in a single appointment (a cleaning and some fillings). It used to be we were only allowed 1 type of appointment because each disciple was designated to certain clinics (RPD clinic, FPD clinic, etc). Also, there is a chair for everyone so there is no more competitive scheduling! Yay! Also, if you have a cancellation, you're required to stay and assist or your PSC will put an emergency patient in your chair to keep you busy. It's awesome.
As president of my class, I've seen the behind-the-scenes over the last few years and let me be very honest here. If this were 2 years ago, I would highly encourage you to look elsewhere. The old system was convoluted and frustrating, and there was so much red tape you practically tripped on it. Now I would recommend this place immensely and while I'm thrilled to be graduating in a year, I'm envious of what this place is going to be after I'm gone. The computer model renderings we have seen are gorgeous and this place is going to look and feel like a state of the art dental school very soon. Construction began a few months ago and is in full swing (jackhammer noises during class are now commonplace, haha). 1 of the main clinics is shut down right now for remodeling and will be done 1 clinic at a time in phases. All clinics, as well as the first floor areas, are scheduled to be finished in early 2014.
With all of the changes (we recently moved to digital charts and x-rays as well), many of the older faculty have relocated or retired. I'm very glad for this because there was this unfortunate system where each department kind of rules the student's lives in a way and it was a very compartmentalized system. With comprehensive care, this broke down for the better and has lead to a lot of the creators of the "old system" to leave. We have a lot of fresh younger dentists with tons of energy and there is a huge emphasis on doing dentistry with the whole patient in mind and not wasting time.
One of the leaders of this change, Dr. Cohlmia, told us last year that clinic utilization among DS3 and DS4 students was around 50% (if you had 8 clinic slots each week, on average you used 4). His goal was to lift this above 90% and it's getting darn close if it's not there already. Just in this summer session alone I've had a patient scheduled in almost every single slot I've had. I probably have 1 opening every 2 weeks and have already seen 3 emergency patients.
Our board rates are amazing (we had 1 fail in our class for Part I, but she was already in our class as a repeat from the previous year so I wasn't surprised) and the recent graduating class had nearly 100% pass on WREB except for 1 student who failed endo and later remediated at a different site and has now passed.
Long story short, OU is in it's biggest transition since the school was built in the 70's. I truly believe this place will be an absolute gem in about a year or so, and is even much better now that it was last year! As a student who has seen the old, the new, and a glimpse of the future, I'm very proud to highly recommend this school. It would be worth your time to visit. As an added bonus, things are dirt cheap in Oklahoma so you won't go broke (or into crippling debt) just to live!
