Oh boy, where do I start on this forum, I wish I would have found it earlier and I hope I remember to cover everything thats been talked about. Im a third year at nova and let me tell you, it is not that bad. You have to realize that every class at every school has a few people that will absolutely hate everything about their school, in this case we have a few who have decided to post on SDN I guess to get the school back, not to mention the second year class is already know by faculty and administration as the class that complains about everything. First of all, yes there are problems at nova, just like there are at all dental schools, but they are trying to be solved. Adding new IGD students without having more faculty and clinic chairs first was a bad idea, but they are in the process of hiring faculty and many things are in the works for clinic chairs. Lets set the additional student situation straight first; first year classes at nova are 105 students, they used to fill the spots of students that dropped out or that were held back with IGD students usually 5-10 making the class size remain 105, with my class they added new sim lab chairs allowing for a class size of 119 and we have about 19 IGDs. In the second year class they added more sim lab chairs so their class will be ~135 with ~35 IGD students. To help solve the clinic chair problem they are opening a 4th year clinic in north Miami beach (about a 30 minute drive from nova) this clinic will have 21-25 chairs opening 21-25 chairs in the predoc clinic at school per day, not bad for only an addition 14 students in clinic per day, this clinic is slated to open in August, but will most likely get pushed back a month or so. I addition the clinic in north Miami will be set up more like a private practice, allowing students to see more patients per day = more procedures completed. There are also more clinic chair projects in the works, but they want to get this one up and running before working on anything else, so problems of the second years even larger class size are already being worked on. There are eventual plans for a new post doc clinic to be built, opening the entire second floor to predoc clinic, but this wont be done for years. Currently in the clinic I have not had any problems booking chairs in clinic and there havent been any fights for chairs, I know things will probably pick up in fall, but so far no problems. Everything else brought up in this thread are sort of non-issues, but Ill touch on them anyways. Lets see, endo course along with many courses are slightly disorganized and for a lot of things they just want you to dive in and figure it out, its slightly stressful, but looking back it was a pretty good way to learn, I realize some people arent good at this and like to get their hands held through all the steps, but if they did this then dental school would probably be 6 six years and require 4x the amount of faculty (youll get used to it and still get a good education). The class room chairs sounds like a problem with your class size and Ill personally bring it up at the student government meeting tonight to see if its been solved yet (not that I think sitting in desks on the side is that big of a deal). First years give tours because third and four years are either seeing patients and cleaning up until well after 12 or setting up for an afternoon patient by 1230. Stealing endo teeth, well sorry it happened, but it never happened in my class, but your class is a lot more cut throat. Time for board studying 4 weeks off at beginning of summer, then classes all day mon, wed and I think you guys have class for an hour on Tues and Thurs = plenty of time to study. As far as the janitor strike, I have no idea what that has to do with anything. The endo cheating thing from a while back was just stupid and not even worth talking about. Ok, not sure if I missed things and I dont really come on here much so I probably wouldnt check back on this thread for a while. If you have any questions for me your best bet is to pm me, sorry if I offended anyone. Also its a great area to live in, a little hot in the summer, it is flat, and the people could be nicer, but other than that its great.
