Odd Semester

This semester has been kind of weird so far. Nothing has been too difficult, but I think the combination of a strange schedule, Ritsuko and Masa going to Japan twice within a 6-month period (they will go again at the end of May), lots of vacationing, and moving to a new place has given a kind of disorganized feeling to everything. I just don't feel like I'm complete in school, and if you look at this schedule you might see why! We finished our spring break over a week ago just to have what amounted to another 5-day weekend. Snow day last Friday + weekend + Monday with only one, skippable class (I did not skip, by the way) + Tuesday with no classes = Spring Break #2!

It wasn't really a spring break #2 for me, but I did do some fun stuff. Friday & Saturday night Ritsuko was kind enough to let me stay the weekend with my dental fraternity (Delta-Sigma-Delta) up at a place in Frisco. Hot tub, drinking games, billards, and of course snowboarding. I didn't want to use any of my A-Basin passes (need to save some to ride with my Uncle Don and cousin Adam!!! and hopefully with Ritsuko sometime this season), so I hiked up from the top of Loveland Pass to the highest point I could find and rode down in the freshes powder of the year. 2 hours up hiking in snowboard boots (no snowshoes), probably a total of 1 hour sitting around breathing hard and enjoying the view, and 10 minutes of unmarked alpine terrain. The sunburn on my nose and upper lip was well worth it! The route I took was 4/5 of a mile long with a 1500 ft. elevation gain up to the Continental Divide. Here is what you would see from the top in the summer. I did not take any pictures myself, though, sorry.

Anyway, school is going well. I have started studying for Part I of the boards in addition to my normal class studies. The one thing I have NOT been doing enough of is getting into the sim clinic to practice preps and restorations (fillings). It's probably because we have not had class since our practical before spring break (it will have been 3-weeks when we finally have class again on Friday). Oh well, I'll get back into it.

Anyway, we are loving the new place and hope that home prices in Denver continue to dive so that our landlord's company will keep renting it to us for the next 3 years instead of putting it back on the market! That's all for now.

Busy Week

This week was a pretty busy week at school with three tests and a lab practical. Tuesday was a general pathology test (mainly oncology), Wednesday was immunology, and Thursday was doubled up with an occlusion lab practical in the morning and our cariology final in the afternoon. If you're wondering, cariology is an extra class they through in about biology and treatment of dental caries. The class basically combines what we already learned in intro to microbiology with the clinic application we are learning in our operative dentistry class.

In other news, we have finalized everything for our new townhome and will get the keys on March 18th, the day we get back from our little excursion to Moab, Utah. I think we'll start packing a few things today and try to get most of our packing done before we head off for spring break. So, next week will be a little busy, with packing to do, a physiology test, and an operative dentistry practical exam. But, we (Ritsuko, Masa, and I) are all really excited to move, so it should go pretty quickly!

Movin' movin' movin'...

Today was look-for-a-new-apartment day. Ritsuko, Masashi, and I went driving around the area looking for a bigger place to call home. We like the apartment (and it's price), area and school system that we live in now, but our current place is just a little too small and crowded feeling. We also don't like the fact that on the 1st floor (which is the only floor 2-bedroom apartments are offered) people are always walking by and can see right into our apartment. We've been talking about getting a new place since Ritsuko and Masa got back from Japan. We had checked out a kind of dumpy place nearby on Thursday, but today was our first day to really get out and look at different places.

We drove through quite a few places, not finding anything we really liked, and then happened upon a really nice looking place and decided to check it out. Nice grounds, nice pool, nice rec. area and stuff, and they offered a 1400 sf 3-bedroom condo, with garage, for about $450/month more than what we currently pay. That's a lot more than we're paying now, but we decided to check it out. Beautiful! Everything new, nice, wonderful looking, lots of space, 3rd floor nice nice nice. The only thing was that the living/kitchen didn't really get much light from the outside. We thought "well, we'll just move in and then pay the $300 to switch condos when another place with better natural light opened up.

So, excited about moving into Whisper Sky Condos, we went home and I got to work on the online application. I don't know how it started, but the natural light issue came up and we began reconsidering the big move we were about to make. Instead of guessing if this condo was the right choice or not after we had signed a lease, we went back and asked to see it again. This time, we went up by ourselves, and the first thing we did was go into the condo and make sure all the lights were off. At 2:30 in the afternoon, the living room was dim and the kitchen so dark it was unusable.

While many people like a dim, cozy cave-like atmosphere for their home, we have always enjoyed letting as much natural sun and air in as possible. There was no way this apartment was going to work, so we decided just to stay at Huntington Ridge (our current place) until something better opened up at Whisper Sky. Then, a few hours later, we got a return phone call about another townhouse I had asked about in a different complex. A 1250 sf, 2-story, 2-bed, 2.5-bath in a nice place just down the street. I said we'd come look at it even though I was thinking we'd just stay at our current location until something at Whisper Sky opened up.

Well, checking out that townhouse was the best move we could have made. While not quite as flashy and with less community perks than Whisper Sky, this townhouse is spacious, bright, open to greenspace, away from busy roads, across the street from a park, AND only about $100 more than what we currently pay in a place that gives us 3/4 less space (and a patio so small it's useless)! We got home, talked about it, and decided it's a GO: we'll be moving April 1st (granted our application and everything goes fine, which it should).

We'll miss the year-round hottub (which has been closed for a month now) and won't really enjoy paying the one-month penalty fee for breaking our lease, but we'll welcome having a bigger place, nice balcony, two stories, nice big oval bathtub, green lawn right out in front of our place, and nobody walking by looking into our home. The new location might add an extra 7 minutes onto my daily bike ride, but we'll remain just as close (or far) from all of our favorite shopping, parks, and friends. The pictures on this post are of our new-home-to-be.

Oh, another thing: if you're looking for a great program to shrink your pictures for the web, thumbnails, or to just take up less space on your Mac hard drive, go download iResizer. Keeps the sweet Mac look and is super-easy to use.

DS1 Semester 2 Update

It's amazing how quickly time flies when you're having fun! The spring semester here at Colorado is going well. My entire month of January was spent entertaining guest and being entertained, both here in Denver and away, and honestly things got a little too hectic for me. Let's see, one weekend my friend from Delaware came out to do some skiing, another weekend my Uncle came out for 4 days to ski, and yet another weekend I flew out to Philadelphia to hang with one of my good friends at Penn Dental. Also, every Monday I WAS in Denver I threw a "Rock & Roll Sushi" party where I basically invited my whole dental class and some others to my little apartment to eat self-rolled sushi and play Rock Band! It was all fun, but I'm glad Ritsuko and Masa are back from Japan (they got back on Feb. 9th) and I can be done with the bachelor life until the next time they travel to Japan.

Currently, Ritsuko and I are looking for a different apartment or house to rent. Masashi starts school (Kindergarten) in July, and we would like to find a slightly bigger place before he starts. Our place now is nice, just a little too small for the three of us. We're actually going to look at a nice 1200 sft townhouse nearby that has its own little sauna in the master bedroom! The only downside to moving before our lease is up in July is having to pay a month's rent penalty. So, it really has to be worth it to move, but like I said, we think it's important to get settled before Masa starts school.

As for school life, spring semester has been pretty relaxed. We have had a lot of days with only one or two classes up until now, and none of the classes are too difficult or require ungodly amounts of studying. I looks like things will change some after Spring Break, though. On top of a tighter schedule, we will also need to begin studying for Part I of the boards. We take Part I in July, but are scheduled in classes all through the summer, so we won't have any time allotted just for preparing for the boards. While it will be nice to get done with Part I after our first year, the hectic rush to get all of the information taught that we need to know before July 14th makes things a little nerve-wracking. Oh well, I guess that's dental school, right?

Well, in just over a week Ritsuko, Masa, and I will be heading for a fun Spring Break in Moab, Utah! Until then, enjoy some pictures of colorful Colorado.

<-On a frozen Echo Lake up near Mt. Evans.

Masa helping me prep a plastic tooth in the simulation clinic ->






<-Ritsuko and I testing the "smile detector" on our new camera








Rob (from Delaware) and I at A-Basin skiing/snowboarding ->








<-Mike (Penn Dental) and I in Times Square, NYC

1st week back

This week has been an eventful week as far as school goes. Yesterday we took our first impressions (on fake teeth) and poured our first casts, and then today we practiced using a highspeed handpiece for the first time! My casts turned out OK, no bubbles. The lab was pretty crowded, though, with all 52 of us split between the two labs mixing stone and alginate, but it went fairly smoothly. The simulation clinic was even more fun, but we have a lot of homework for the next week: memorize what the names of a bunch of burs and instruments and what the code numbers on them mean. Not too hard, just have to take the time to do it. We used our handpieces today to practice preping (drilling out parts) this little practice pad. It had different shapes on it, some which resembled preps you might do in certain teeth. It had 3 layers: white (enamel), yellow (dentin), and red (pulp). The idea was to prep the shape without going deeper than the dentin and maintaining the margins (represented by the black outline of the shape). Everyone was dusty from the plastic residue of the practice pad, but everyone sounded like they were having fun!

Some of our other classes aren't too fun, like Physiology. I do like the subject, but the class is just boring. Cariology should be OK, but we don't have that too often. There's also General Pathology, but we haven't had a lecture in there yet. Microbiology should be good, but we don't get around to that until later in the semester.

Tonight, some friends are coming over to play Rock Band. Nothing too exciting, as I'll probably go in to school tomorrow to study and finish up a couple more impressions/cast I need to make.

Other 1st Semester classes at UCSODM

We had a lot of classes first semester besides Anatomy and Biochemistry, most of which seemed to be of minimal importance. Let's list them out with a short (opinionated) description:

Intro to Microbiology: somewhat difficult, very relevant to Part I boards, but wasn't sure what the point was considering the fact that we have full-blown Micro this semester (DS1 Spring).

Professional Decision Making: a completely pointless, 1/2 ethics 1/2 statistics course. Obtained absolutely zero knowledge from this class that will prove to be helpful to my dental career.

Introduction to Dentistry: The overview of the different disciplines of dentistry was interesting, standing around in clinic looking for someone to hold suction for was not.

Introduction to Dental Materials: kind of interesting, actually learned some use stuff in this class. But, it's an "intro" class, meaning we will have the actual class at a later date. Now that we are in operative (sim clinic), though, I can appreciate why they might have wanted to introduce us to dental materials without going into too much detail right away.

Dental Morphology: this course actually consumes a lot of your time as it involves creating properly formed teeth out of wax. There is a lecture portion of the class, too, which covers the anatomy of the various teeth. This is probably the most frustrating class for many people, as whether or not your tooth looks "good" is very subjective and depends upon the grader. Learning the anatomy of the teeth is obviously very important, though, for both working as a dentist and passing Part I of the boards. This course actually continues into the Spring a week or two, and our final is next Monday.

There it is, the low-down on UCSODM (University of Colorado [Denver] School of Dental Medicine) 1st semester courses.

Other 1st Semester classes at UCSODM

Dental School Semester 1 in Review: Biochemistry & Anatomy

I'm back finally and ready to fill you in on my first semester of dental school. The fact that I haven't posted anything since the end of my first month should tell you that things were pretty busy. I did have some free time, but the last thing I wanted to do with the little bit I had was sit in front of this computer for another 30 minutes. Anyway, what I'll do is breakdown the semester by class, so you can see what we have to deal with our first semester at U. of Colorado. I don't know how typical our schedule is, given we take Part I of the Boards the summer after our first year, but it will give you some idea what dental school here is like. And then, if I have time, I'll throw in some of the fun stuff I did this semester!

Biochemistry:
We had biochemistry classes from August 19th through October 24th. You can see the schedule (click here), but we basically had class 2 hours a day, 4 days a week. It was the first of our "big" classes for 1st semester, being given about 5 credit hours for the class. If you had 1st semester of biochemistry in undergrad, you won't find that surprises you, but the speed at which the class progresses can be challenging. If you didn't have biochem in undergrad, I the class could be a little more difficult. The most challenging aspect of our class was the fact that the professor would use "more than one but not all" as a choice for many of the questions on our tests, which were multiple choice. Of course, if you came from a school where the biochem teacher would give you a blue book and tell you to start drawing structures of everything you know, a slightly tougher multiple choice doesn't seem that hard. The tests could be hard, but everything was curved so that 2/3 of the class ended up with either and A or A-. No one failed. Oh, and if you really love drawing structures you'll find our Biochem class dissappointing: you will never have to draw any structures for the tests. Being able to draw structures might help you remember stuff, but you'll probably find your time spent better just going through the powerpoints and practice tests. Another thing, there's really no reason to read from the book.

Anatomy:
Our anatomy class started October 19th and went through the end of the semester. We started 7-hour days of anatomy on Oct. 22nd and dissection lab on the 28th. While we didn't have 7-hour days everyday, it was about a 9 credit hour class crammed into half of a semester, so you can imagine how busy things were. The class really consisted of five parts: gross anatomy, neurology, angiology, histology (without all the histological slides, thank god), and very simple embryology.
Gross anatomy was only from the waist up and no muscles of the forearm or hand. Obviously, the focus was on head and neck, which was very detailed and challenging. The craziest part was when we used the "Butcher Boy" band saw to bisect the upper-half of the cadaver along the midline (think down the middle of the nose) and then procede to dissect various parts of the head, nasal cavity, oral cavity, orbit, and cranial cavity on both sides of the body. Muscles were usually easy; the most difficult part was finding and keep straight the various nerves and their branches throughout the head and neck.
Neurology was probably the most time-consume part of the class, have to learn what kind of axons went where, what they did, where they would leave one nerve and joine another, where their cell bodies resided in either the central nervous system or peripherial nervous system, and where information was relayed to in the various parts of the brain.
Angiology was simple but also somewhat time consuming: basically we had to be able to tell you the route blood would flow from the heart to some part of the body and then back to the heart. Sometimes, the professor would say one particular route was blocked and so you'd have to detail a less obvious route. We did not deal with dieseases of the circulatory system.
Histology was simply an overview of the various types of cell and tissue types of the body. Pretty straight forward, and I don't remember there being any histological slides (as there are no histological slides on the boards).
Embryology was the easiest part and consisted primarily of knowing what parts of the head and neck developed from which of the four pharyngeal arches. Very straight forward and easy to remember.
All in all, anatomy was a memorable experience. I usually spent 5 more hours a day outside of class studying for this class once it started. Most everyone else was studying like this or more, though, so there were always people at school to study with. This made things go fairly smoothly, even making it fun sometimes! Well, everyone says anatomy is our hardest class, and I got through with a B, so I'm a happy camper.

These were our main two classes for the 1st semester. I'll go over the myriad of other classes we had in my next segment.