Dental school is a very arduous experience; and solely finishing school doesn’t actually get us what we want – not by itself anyway. To become a dentist in most states throughout the US, there are several requirements, which include, but are not necessarily limited to:

• A degree from an ADA CODA-accredited dental school,
• Passing the National Board Dental Examinations I and II,
• Passing one of the Regional Board Examinations

Though regional board exams are a point of controversy among many in the United States right now, they are still a part of our current situation…. So we have to be able to conquer them! This becomes a daunting process when you are looking to spend upwards of $3,500 and the first things you hear about boards may be tidbits like…. “I still have nightmares about those 2 days,”  “I’ve never felt so much stress in my life,” “It was hell.”

So what was my first step? I assisted candidates taking both of the regional board examinations offered at our school, WREB and CRDTS, to help me decide which one to take.  I can’t emphasize enough how great of a learning experience this was! Not only did I get to see and experience how nerve-wracking boards is, I got to watch a plethora of students make it through the process unscathed!

What did I gain from assisting? I learned that getting good patients is vitally important (including making sure the nearby teeth are also in good shape).  I also learned how important it is to trust your instincts and skills! Another important piece of advice is to practice using all materials and instruments you intend to use on the day of - don’t try anything new you’ve never done before.  Additionally, I learned that you should always do a final inspection of your preparation with the super-sharp explorer that is sent up with the patient, because that’s what your graders will be using.  Finally, I learned how important it is to know the in’s and out’s of the specific test you are taking --- read and learn the instruction manual ahead of time!

Most importantly, I decided on which exam I will be taking.  This is a different decision-making process for everyone because it depends on multiple factors such as where you intend to live and what your specific strengths/weaknesses are.  So to all those 4^th years who passed boards in the last few months – CONGRATS! To all my fellow 3^rd years who will be taking boards less than a year from now – GOOD LUCK! To all of the 2^nd and 1^st years who still have some time – make sure to assist various boards exams, get some cash along the way, and see which exam suits you more.

With an array of things to do over spring break, a couple of us decided to help out with a continuing education course at the dental school. Fun, I know!

In actuality, it turned out to be a great experience.  We met Dr. André Ritter (one of the co-authors for our Operative book), had great free food, and had the opportunity to witness what exactly CE entailed.

The course titled “Achieving Excellence with Direct Composite,” incorporated a lecture on anterior and posterior case studies, followed by two hands-on activities in the sim lab. The educational session was short; we missed most of it due to the fact we had to prepare the sim lab. The sim lab was a mess but we were able to make it presentable for the 20 or so dentists and EDDA’s. That’s right EDDA’s (expanded duties dental assistant).

Dr. Ritter showed us how to restore class IV, class I, and class II restorations using 3M ESPE composites, including body and translucent types. The procedure included using a lingual stent, and building up different layers using the various types of composite. He outlined how to incorporate developmental grooves and mamelons using the translucent type of composite. It was actually quite comforting to know the process was similar to the method we were taught in Esthetic Dentistry, just using slightly altered techniques to make it look more esthetic and, of course, the use of better (more expensive) polishing instruments.

The best part was when the participants were practicing.  We were given the opportunity to pick Dr. Ritter’s brain. Not only was his work on plastic teeth amazing, he was also tremendously approachable and friendly.

For the most part, it was a great experience, and I walked away with some really great tips for using composite!

And since we all know dental students’ relationship with free food, the event was catered by Gourmet To Go, and it was quite tasty!

Over the past year, ASDA has had increasing involvement with the Comitis Shelter, a shelter near campus that houses individuals and families. Since beginning our involvement with the shelter, I’ve been surprised to learn more about the causes of homelessness and the statistics of those that are affected. For example, did you know there are over 14,000 homeless children in Colorado? As the holidays approach, giving back to our local community becomes increasingly important and your help can truly make a difference for a family in need. One of the most crucial steps to helping is to become educated about individuals experiencing homelessness and to deconstruct misperceptions. During our first time volunteering at Comitis, I met a veteran currently undergoing chemotherapy at the Anschutz campus. Because of the intensive treatment, he’s unable to work and is residing at the shelter with his two young daughters. This gentleman, among others, represents one of the real reasons that a majority of these individuals are homeless. Sickness happens. Job loss happens. Death happens. Divorce happens. Sometimes people experience tough times.

My mentor, Dr. Bruce, inspired me years ago to take on a giving attitude as a dental student and eventual practitioner. In addition to running a successful practice, Dr. Bruce and his wife volunteer at a local shelter once a week to provide dental care to those in need. His goal is to provide emotional and spiritual guidance in addition to dental care to enable people to live a better life. I’ve witnessed the personal transformations and success stories of those that Dr. Bruce has worked with and have been inspired to continue this act of giving now, and throughout my career.

How can we, as students, make a difference in the lives of others? In addition to providing dental education, there are several ways we can give back. Below are 5 ways you can help from justgive.org this holiday season and throughout the year. Visit https://www.justgive.org/donations/help-homeless.jsp for a full list of ideas for involvement!

1. Volunteer at a shelter - Shelters thrive on the work of volunteers, from those who sign people in, to those who serve meals, to others who counsel the homeless on where to get social services. For the homeless, a shelter can be as little as a place to sleep out of the rain, or as much as a step toward self-sufficiency.
2. Tutor homeless children - A tutor can make all the difference. Just having adult attention can spur children to do their best. Many programs exist in shelters, transitional housing programs, and schools that require interested volunteers. Or begin you own tutor volunteer corps at your local shelter. It takes nothing more than a little time.
3. Donate clothing - Next time you do your spring or fall cleaning, keep an eye out for those clothes that you no longer wear. If these items are in good shape, gather them together and donate them to organizations that provide housing for the homeless.
4. Donate toys – Children living in shelters have few possessions --if any-- including toys. Homeless parents have more urgent demands on what little money they have, such as food and clothing. So often these children have nothing to play with and little to occupy their time. You can donate toys, books, and games to family shelters to distribute to homeless children. For Christmas or Chanukah, ask your friends and co-workers to buy and wrap gifts for homeless children.
5. Teach about the homeless - If you do volunteer work with the homeless, you can become an enthusiast and extend your enthusiasm to others. You can infect others with your own sense of devotion by writing letters to the editor of your local paper.

This year, I’ve been fortunate to work alongside so many good hearted and compassionate individuals dedicated to making a positive difference in our community. During our school wide warm clothing donation drive for our local shelter, hundreds of students and faculty donated warm clothing and helped spread the word to local organizations. The DS1 students even raised enough money to purchase nearly 30 coats for the shelter! Colorado winters are rough and it was great to see so many students work together to help keep people warm this winter.

It’s the season of giving and now is the perfect time to give back and help families in need. Check out this website to learn more about facts and statistics of those experiencing homelessness and email me if you’d like to get involved! http://closetohomeco.org/learn/about-homelessness/

Kimberly.engols@ucdenver.edu

Getting concrete information on world affairs can often feel like trying to build a restoration out of Jello. It seems no matter where you look, news is inherently biased and trying to push one political agenda or another. Factual reporting seems to have evaporated like acrylic monomer beneath the sun. So it is with some trepidation that I set out to write about the Syrian refugee crisis. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the better part of the decade, there has been a fair amount of strife in Syria. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you write an understatement. There are at least three factions—and really more like five or six—vying for control of a country 25% smaller than Colorado. Imagine, if you will, living in a place where instead of hearing honking horns, gunfire is more the norm. A place where you must live in constant fear of bombings—both from the sky and from the ground. A place where, at any given moment, your life could end. Try to imagine what you would do in such a place.

I recently met a patient in screening. He told me his teeth hurt, which is not uncommon in that clinic. We chatted for a while about how the school works and what he could expect from his time with us. I did notice he wasn’t opening his mouth much to talk. While playing the waiting-for-faculty game, we made small talk. Food came up, and I mentioned I like middle-eastern cuisine. He told me he was from Syria, and he suggested I try the restaurant at which he works. I thought nothing of it.

Then I looked in his mouth.

His teeth—all 28 of them—were ground down to below the CEJ. His mouth looked like someone had taken a handpiece and leveled every tooth to an almost-perfect flat plane. I had to resist the urge to gasp. I asked him about his habits, trying to determine an etiology of what I was seeing. It was a short conversation.

His answer was that he ground his teeth during times of stress. Over the past couple of years, twenty-nine of his extended family members had been killed in and around Syria. Twenty. Nine. They had been killed in the civil war. They had been murdered by ISIS. They had perished trying to flee across the Mediterranean. The how doesn’t really matter.

Imagine your extended family. If I think, I can come up with about fifty names of family members with whom I have a connection. Now imagine that over half of them are dead. It’s a sobering thought.

I set out to write this article without taking a side on the refugee crisis. But every time I hear about the thousands of people fleeing Syria, my mind involuntarily returns to this patient. Never have I met someone who so starkly illustrated just how good our lives are in this country.

In the wake of the attacks in Paris, this issue has risen to the very forefront of mainstream media. Like so many issues, it has become politicized, where every person has to pick a side—red or blue. There are those who fear ISIS will sneak into our country under the guise of refugees. And there are those who feel compelled to open our borders and welcome the refugees.

I completely understand both sides of the argument. Am I afraid of ISIS entering our country? Of course I am. It’s a very real fear, the kind of fear that can turn your stomach to ice. But you all know the line: “All we have to fear is fear itself.” That fear shouldn’t make us lose our decency as human beings. If we let fear divide us, ISIS has already won.

To say it is a complicated problem would be to call the sun warm. But I always go back to this patient. How can I, in good conscience, sit in the relative safety of my home, and at the same time deny this man a chance to reunite with the remaining members of his family? No matter how many arguments I read, I can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t know the right answer. As H.L. Menkin once said, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

What I do know is that, this week especially, I’m thankful for the country in which I live. I’m thankful for the men and women who fight to defend the freedoms I often take for granted. And I’m thankful that—in the not-too-distant future—my chosen profession will allow me to help patients like this, taking away some part of their pain, however small a part it may be.

I would welcome conversation and debate, as long as it is kept civil. At the end of the day, we’re all on the same team.

I have never been the type of person to be on student government or run for positions that required any sort of political understanding. Needless to say my knowledge about what we would be doing at National Lobby Day in Washington D.C. was at a minimum. I was chosen to go and figured that I would take more of a backseat approach, learning what it was like to be involved with ASDA at the national level while watching the experts do the lobbying, but I would do much more than that.

Monday was our first day in D.C., and it was spent entirely at the hotel. We had lectures, meetings, and breakout sessions that were all meant to be informative and help us in our lobbying efforts the next day. The two specific bills that we would be lobbying for were the H.R. 539: Dental Health Act and the H.R. 649: Student Loan Refinancing Act. H.R. 539 would allow programs like the Mission of Mercy (MOM) and Give Kids a Smile access to readily available funds ($15 million) from the CDC that they were previously not able to apply for. H.R. 649 would allow students to refinance their loans in the future if the federal student loan interest rate were to dip below what they had previously borrowed it for.

The morning was a mix of presentations on the details of both of these bills, what to focus on when speaking to legislators, and some presentations by different sponsors. We broke for lunch, where I had the opportunity to sit and eat with students from the University of New York at Buffalo along with the president of the ADA, Dr. Feinberg. Our afternoon session consisted of more presentations, mock meetings with legislators, and concluded with speeches by two dentists (now state representatives) from Texas. With that we broke for the day and were on our own. We met briefly as a group to discuss our tactics when meeting with legislators the following day, and then we were off to dinner.

The next day was an early one, with the buses scheduled to leave at 7:15am and our first meeting at 8:30. We had a busy day planned with seven meetings in all, the last one coming at three in the afternoon. Our first meeting was with Cory Gardner’s office, a senator from Colorado. We spoke with his aid for a bit about the two bills that we were advocating for. He was very receptive to what we had to say and the meeting was more relaxed than I expected, which reminded me of most of my dental school interviews; nervous at first, but merely conversational once I had settled in. We were lucky enough to have Cory Gardner stop in for a few minutes and hear what we had to say, even telling us about his experiences with COMOM. The first meeting of the day went really well, and we were off to a good start in our lobbying efforts.

Since we felt that having all seven of us in each meeting was a bit of overkill, we decided to approach the rest of the meetings as smaller groups, mostly consisting of three or four people. Another reason for this approach was that we were constantly walking the whole day, from house to the senate, senate to the house: it was a workout to say the least. Splitting into groups allowed us more time between meetings to make sure we were not late. We had six meetings scheduled for the rest of the day: a senator from Colorado, two senators from New Mexico, and three representatives from Colorado. Of these six remaining meetings, five of them went really well while one seemed like a complete disaster. All in all it seemed to be a pretty successful day that ended around 3:30 and with us heading straight to the airport from the senate building, back on a plane to Denver a mere 52 hours after we had arrived.

If you’ve read this far and are thinking to yourself, “this sounds like too much work, I’d want to at least do some exploring of D.C.”, you probably aren’t friends with me on ‘Snapchat’. The Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, and the National Museum of American History: these were just a few of the sites we got to see in our limited time in Washington. If you do know me personally then you probably saw most of these as low quality pictures from around D.C., showing just how much fun I got to have along with how much I learned while at National Lobby Day. This is something I hope to convey to you if you haven’t been involved much with ASDA, and it doesn’t have to be at the national level, nor a huge commitment. I encourage you to get involved in local events because they are a great networking experience, informative, and fun! All I know is that I would not have done it any differently and I’m so thankful to have been able to go.

Being a great leader is something that each of us strives for.  We all have a little bit of leader in us somewhere... we've always been driven for success, and we all hope to be our own bosses someday.  We're all pretty responsible -- I mean, we had to be to get into dental school, right? -- but I think I'd be speaking for many of us if I said that the idea of being a great leader is pretty darn intimidating.

This weekend, Colorado ASDA had the honor of hosting Dr. David Rice, founder of IgniteDDS, at our first annual Leadership Workshop.  Dr. Rice has been an immensely popular speaker at past ASDA events, such as regional meetings and the Annual Session, and we were fortunate enough to have him speak to us here, on our very own campus!

IgniteDDS is an organization that works to get people really fired up about dentistry, whether they're patients, students, or dental professionals.  As this workshop was tailored toward dental students and pre-dents, Dr. Rice focused on teaching us to be successful, and how we can really jump-start our careers in dentistry.  Prior to the event, each of us took a DiSC behavioral assessment, the results of which we discussed during the workshop.  Essentially, the DiSC assessment categorizes people into one of four different personality types: Domint, Influential, Steady, and Conscientious.  The theory behind the DiSC is that each of us has one of these personalities, which majorly affects our relationships and interactions with other people.  Dr. Rice described each of these personalities and how they relate to professionalism in dentistry.  In order to be successful in your business, you must build a solid rapport with many different types of people.  In order to do so, you must first know how to work with a range of personalities, and get each type of person to trust and feel comfortable with you.  Staffing a variety of personality types is a great way to maximize the likelihood that your patients will feel at ease being treated in your dental office.  Dr. Rice mentioned many times that treating others as you wish to be treated may have worked in elementary school, but treating others as they wish to be treated is what will get you far in the professional world.  Each patient brings their unique personality into your practice, and with that comes a challenge. Being able to read your patients and work with them on a level in which they feel understood and appreciated will get you far in your practice.

If you are interested in learning more about IgniteDDS or Dr. David Rice, please check out their website, and "like" them on Facebook.  If you'd like to know the specifics of the DiSC personalities, and are interested in finding out where you lie on the spectrum, click here.

Like most students in the 21^st century, you probably use the internet as your primary source of information. The downside is the abundance of information. Some good, some bad, and some that may not be applicable to your situation. A great solution to this problem is the American Student Dental Association (ASDA). ASDA memberships go far beyond getting the information that you need. They also offer helpful tips for bettering your chances of being accepted into dental school. You’ll also get their publications for free. The experiences, networking opportunities, and member discounts that are available are worth the membership fee itself.

If your experience online was anything like mine, you’ve probably spent hours reading information from various sources. Needless to say, some of these sources may have made you feel like you had no chance of getting into dental school. After joining ASDA, I realized that my chances of getting accepted were greater than I had first thought. All of their information gets right to the point. I learned that the road to dental school is not as confined as some websites would lead you to believe. They have advice on which schools may be best for you, how to write those pesky personal statements, DAT preparation, and the requirements for applying. Are you interested in the field of dentistry, but not certain about the investment? ASDA can definitely help, giving information on life before, during, and after dental school by dentist and dental students.

 As an ASDA member you’re never alone, with chapters all over the nation. Depending on your location some chapters offer great pre-dental programs that allow you to talk with current dental students and other dental professionals. These events are a gold mine of information and guidance. You get to meet directly with current dental students who have been where you are currently. I attended an event that met every Saturday, over eight weeks that was about two hours away from where I live. The drive was long, but definitely worth it with mock-interviews, DAT strategies, and prize giveaways. My favorite part was working with a hand piece to fill cavities on model teeth. The best part was the welcoming and helpful environment the dental students provided. Most even gave their contact information for any questions or personal statement reviews.

Being a part of ASDA can greatly increase your odds of getting into a dental school too. This is a nationally recognized association of dental students. So imagine how good it would look to put “ASDA Member” under the Professional Experience section, of your AADSAS application. You can also build your resume by being active within the association. For example, if you’re a writer, you can apply to write for their many national publications which includes Mouth, ASDA News, and the Mouthing Off blog.

In addition to all of this, ASDA offers discounts and their publications for free. The publications are very beneficial to pre-dental students.  As a member, you’re offered discounts on auto insurance and DAT preparation material. Trust me, if you’re not looking for insurance, the discounts on the test prep material are worth the membership fee itself. You also get Mouth sent to you quarterly and ASDA News monthly for free. As a pre-dental member, you will also receive Getting into Dental School: ASDA’s Guide for Predental Students. This guide gives you information about every dental school, career options as a dentist, and details about the loans and scholarships that are available

You already know that just the application process for dental school is a big investment. Out of all the resources available to you, why not use the one that will be the most beneficial? There are a ton of places where you can learn about dentistry. But, you’ll have to take time out of your already busy schedule to find what will actually help you. With an ASDA membership you’ll have what you need to succeed. Don’t make the process harder than it has to be. Join ASDA now to help you with your journey into dentistry.

~Reggie Perdue, Pre-Dental ASDA Member

Over the last few months, new students have been anxiously awaiting the start of dental school, and at last, Friday concluded DS1 summer orientation.  Students got a chance to learn about their new classmates via daily ice breakers and fun interactive activities, while also getting to know the staff and support offered at the School of Dental Medicine.  Highlights from the week include Apple support day, where IT staff helped students set up their new MacBook computers, a scavenger hunt which allowed students to work together to find important places around campus, and a barbecue in which upperclassmen had the opportunity to speak about different student organizations on campus.  DS1s also had to opportunity to attend a Colorado Rockies game and mingle with their classmates, professors, and SODM staff.

With a week of orientation under their belts, the Class of 2018 has officially begun their journey through the next four years.

On behalf of Colorado ASDA, good luck and have fun!