What are your 3rd and 4th year experiences at USC?

[mdebourg]

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Hi there,

I was invited to interview at USC and I want to hear what the 3rd and 4th year students feel about this school. Could you please provide some pro's and con's of your experiences?

What is it like getting patients?
Do you feel that you are becoming well prepared?
Do you find yourself working with or competing against other classmates?

Those are just some sample questions I would like to hear about, please don't limit your responses to this! I want to get a good idea of what to expect from this program.

Thanks!

 

[cmcner]

I'm a 4th year student at USC and I feel like I am becoming well prepared to transition into private practice dentistry when I leave here this spring. You have to do a lot of procedures here in order to fulfill the requirements for graduation, It takes a little while to build your patient pool up, so the beginning of third year is a little bit slow until things get moving, but once that happens you end up being in clinic most of the time. Clinic at USC doesn't really feel like a competitive place to me, your classmates are like co-workers once you enter clinic, they mainly just work around you and not with you and you spend most of your time interacting with your patient and the faculty. You'll be friends with most of them from the pre-clinic years but you will almost never work next to the same classmate two days in a row in clinic.

There are a lot of changes happening at USC right now, by the time your class enters clinic you won't have to book your own chairs for patients any more, so scheduling should become a little bit easier and you wan't have to call all of your own patients and do a bunch of front office work, but this program is just in the pilot phase right now with a small number of students, so we'll see how it goes once the work the small problems out.

All in all clinic is just a race to the finish from the time you get in until you graduate, when you see the third years start clinic is when you really realize how much you've learned in the past year and how much of a better dentist you've become since you started seeing patients. Two years of focusing on graduating actually results in some pretty good experience and your skills will greatly improve as time goes on.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

 

[mdebourg]

Thanks for your input. I was getting a little concerned about the program because of some posts I read by students in previous years. Mostly about the difficulty of getting a chair to see your patients in order to meet graduation requirements.

How helpful have faculty been there?

Is it alright if I PM you about other questions?

 

[Timpson]

.

 

[steiner2]

USC is a joke. I don't recommend coming here at all. I don't really have the time to elaborate but trust me on this, 95% of the students here will tell you the same.

Yeah, I'll find out 4 saturdays from now when a lot of the Trojans gather. I will prob not apply there given the cost and the unhappy students.