Welcome from the Dean
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 our faculty your experience will be academically rigorous, highly stimulating and also social, supportive and student-friendly. We will comprehensively prepare you for an exciting, highly respected and rewarding career in dentistry and oral health care.
Since the start of the Bachelor of Dentistry program in 2001 and the Bachelor of Oral Health program in 2005, the faculty has developed and gradually implemented an educational philosophy that embraces the concepts of self-directed, problem-based learning based on clinical practice informed by scientific evidence. The aim of this approach is to promote excellence in dentistry.
Our first BDent graduates entered the workforce in 2005, and our first Oral Health Therapy graduates entered the workforce in 2008.
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, your career may take the shape of a dental practitioner, oral health therapists, or dental specialist for our postgraduate candidates.
During your time with us you will be required to attend the two major teaching hospitals, the Sydney Dental Hospital and the Westmead Centre for Oral Health. In addition, you will experience placements in urban or rural community dental clinics.
We will expect you to conduct yourself with the kind of honourable and mature behaviour associated with a caring profession. As a student clinician you will be accorded significant privileges in the health care institutions, and the faculty will require you to honour these privileges. Our expectation is that you respect both the patients you treat and the staff who help make the patient treatment experience possible.
You are arriving in the faculty at an important and interesting time. Most likely, you will experience curriculum reform and structural reform during your years with us. We intend all of these changes to improve your study outcomes and student experiences, making you an even better member of the oral health team in the society.
Again, welcome to the Faculty of Dentistry and to the University of Sydney. 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 of the Faculty of Dentistry