Our First Dental School Project
They say that dental school is a step up in rigor compared to undergrad. At this moment, I'm not sure if that statement is true or not. However, I will admit that dental school is a step up in the number of hours I spend in school each day.
Gone are the days when I can catch a mid-afternoon nap between my molecular biology lecture and my organic chemistry lab. Gone are the days when I can go home and cook lunch. Gone are the days when I only spend three hours per day in lecture hall or labs.
Nowadays, I spend my mornings (8am-12pm) with my problem-based learning (PBL) group discussing the inflammatory response, ibuprofen, and keloids. After a one hour lunch, I head upstairs towards the sim lab for morphology or amalgam lab from 1pm-5pm. On the not-so-good days, I stay in lab from 5pm - midnight to finish morphology projects.
Without further ado, I introduce you to our first morphology project: taking impressions of a typodont, casting the impressions with Fujirock, and mounting the model in an articulator.
There are some flaws with my model. Most prominently, my bases are too wide (I definitely have to trim them closer to the model in the future). There are a few rough edges in my plaster and some positive bubbles that I tried to patch up. Also, my models slightly deviate from maximum intercuspation (MIP).
Despite all of the flaws, I'm still proud of my model - my first dental school project! This is the project that has been consuming my waking hours during our first two weeks of dental school. It's the reason why I've been neglecting this blog. Mixing plaster, trimming stone, sanding down the rough edges, scraping off the positive bubbles, filling in minute defects. Sometimes, I feel like I'm in art school. Maybe I'll be the next Michelangelo?
