^^I'm also curious about that because taking one class at a time seems a bit strange. I don't know if I could stay engaged that long during a day.
I highly doubt that's a problem that you'll have while you're here. It's too fast-paced for you to not be engaged. You have to be taking notes or doing something to keep up otherwise you WILL fall behind very quickly. Yes, you do take one class at a time, but it's not in a standard way by any means. On average, you go through about one class a week with midterms every 2 days and a final the next Monday. You then start the next class right after your Monday finals. The harder more important courses are two weeks long (head and neck, etc.).
For reference, when we were in our first year, some of our classes were even shorter than a week and way too condensed. We went through all of microbiology in 3 days, and immunology in another 3 -with an exam every day. That's 350 or so slides a day of information, with an exam the next morning. There is NO room for slacking off. The schedule has since been adjusted to be a little less intense, and some of the first-years would be better suited to tell you how those changes have helped them. The thing I like about this school is that they take seriously the complaints and comments from the students and try to change things. While those changes likely won't be noticed by the classes in the same year, they can be seen from year to year. There are a lot of things that our class has been observing for the first years, and it seems unfair that we didn't have the same schedule, but we ARE happy to see that the changes we suggested are being made.
In terms of this set-up: I prefer it this way, but I also hate it at the same time. The reasons for this:
1. I'm terrible at didactics when I'm under pressure, and it's reflected in my grades. I have to work a lot harder than most of my peers to understand the information and remember it well enough, but thank God I've made it through without any issues to date. Not everyone has the same issues I do though, so if you're good at didactics then it won't be an issue.
2. The flip side to this is that because they smash all the didactics at you in the first year, you spend the last 1/4 of 1st year in the clinic learning operative I, and in your second year, you're in the simulation clinic 4 days a week with one day in the classroom on Fridays (only half the time, the other half your in the clinic on Fridays as well). So you can see how getting all the classwork out of the way in the first year is beneficial to you when it comes to learning how to actually be a dentist. It lets you focus entirely on what you're doing in lab instead of being forced to choose whether or not you want to put more effort into making sure you don't fail a class and suffering in lab because of it. Hope all this makes sense.
