Well USC is an "enjoyable" place to go to dental school, and that's worth noting since dental school is usually hell. The faculty tends to treat you with respect and people go out and have a good time quite a bit. This school is all about clinical, people talk about PBL all the time but we only have that 8 hours a week, and by the time you get to second year it's more like 2-3 hours a week even though it's still scheduled for 8 hours a week.
We spend all our time in sim lab doing pre-clinical things that will actually be applicable to practice. You will start drilling even before the first official day of school here. First year they ease you in with amalgam, tooth morphology, and PBL first semester. You get like a day and a half off a week and get to have a really good time. That day off is in there so you can go on your radiology rotations and take x-rays when your turn comes up. Second trimester it starts to get harder, Amalgam continues, you go into Composite, Occlusion while still having PBL. Third trimester it really starts to get rough you continue Composite, while taking Indirect restoration which is preparing teeth for crowns and making provisional (temporaries) and use CEREC, you take sophomore perio block and clean each other's teeth, you also take head and neck anatomy lab, and PBL again.
So at the end of your first year you know how to fill every type of cavity, make or place veneers, clean teeth, and do a crown.
Second year first trimester you take post fixed where you do bridges and harder crown preps on posterior teeth, you also have to cast your own crown out of gold, you also take ortho, pedo, endo, treatment planning, and you also take perio again but this time you work on patients. oh yeah and PBL
Second trimester you take anesthesia, implant treatment planning, more perio, more ortho, start studying for boards, anterior fixed, removable partial dentures, perio implant lab and oh yeah that pesky PBL again.
Then after that you go into clinic and start working on patients for the next 2 and a half years
So as you can see we focus on the preclinical stuff, they drill it into you, the smother you with it, and you will be better for it.
As far as graduating on time everyone but one person who I know graduated on time, and that one person took a different pathway where he went to all the CE courses this school offered so that he'd learn more(they cost a fraction for students compared to the public), but he had to skip class to do it. Lots of my friends went on to specialize all across the country, I don't know exact stats but I know where these people went.
I personally would not have gone to any other school at this point. USC was like the bottom of my list due to price and it was the only school I got into. I am happy here and I live a great life, the stress comes and the long hours and hard days, but that's just part of dental school. I've gone to every football game, we have sick tailgates, everyone helps each other out and you get treated like a human. Plus the undergrad girls are smoking and the weather is sweet.
I am very happy with USC. I know that last year all the graduating seniors that I was friends with said this was the best four years of their life, and you never hear that about dental school.
