Dean's welcome
Welcome to the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Sydney, Australia’s first! We are very happy that you have decided to join our Faculty.
As a student of the Faculty, your experience with us will be academically rigorous, highly stimulating and also student-friendly, supportive and social. We strive to comprehensively prepare you for an exciting, highly respected and rewarding career in dentistry and oral health care.
Since the implementation of the BDent program in 2001, the Faculty has developed and gradually implemented a new educational philosophy and embraced the concepts of self-directed, problem-based learning and of self-evaluation in education with an aim to promoting excellence in Dentistry. Our first BDent graduates entered the workforce in 2005.
As a student within the Faculty of Dentistry, your educational experience will involve a blend of clinical, medical and dental science, and dental and clinical practice based on a comprehensive care approach. You will also have the opportunity to develop skills in critical analysis, reasoning, team work and problem solving to help you prepare for a professional career and for your life-long learning.
Members of the teaching staff are committed to your education and to your evolution as an ethical, empathetic, scientifically informed and clinically competent oral health care provider. Depending on your course of study, this may take the shape of a dental practitioner, or dental hygienist/therapist, or dental specialist for our postgraduate candidates.
During your time with us you will be required to attend the two major teaching hospitals of the Faculty – the Sydney Dental Hospital and the Westmead Centre for Oral Health. We will expect of you the kind of honourable and mature behaviour associated with a caring profession in settings in which the University is a guest, albeit an honoured one. You will be accorded significant privileges in these two institutions, and the Faculty will require you to honour these privileges. Our expectation will be that you respect both the patients you treat and the staff who help make your patient treatment experience possible.
Again, welcome to the Faculty and to the University. I hope you will involve yourself fully in all that is offered to you. We have a common goal in your preparation for a professional life, and in your successful contribution to the future wellbeing of the community.
Professor Eli Schwarz, KOD
Dean