General Information

Who is the University of Detroit Mercy School of Dentistry?

The School of Dentistry combines a history of commitment to serving the oral health needs in a metropolitan area while educating competent and successful dentists. Graduating students choose a variety of career paths, including dental practice, or graduate programs such as orthodontics, endodontics, oral surgery, pediatrics, periodontics and/or graduate residency programs.

Three principles guide the curriculum programs and policies at UDM:

• A student-centered dental and biomedical teaching faculty providing an exceptional dental education.
• A community-focused institution providing oral health services in an urban-based setting.
• An emphasis on research in biomedical, clinical, and education sciences.

What Makes the University of Detroit Mercy an Outstanding Choice?

UDM's dental educational program provides a learning environment based on the real world of contemporary dental practice. Unlike other dental schools, UDM does not ask you to spend your time performing procedures, which are completed by the dental laboratory technologist in the real world of dentistry. Instead, you have meaningful patient care experiences starting the first week of your freshman year - so that what you learn throughout the curriculum what will be directly relevant to your dream of becoming a dentist.

Your class size will be small enough to provide you with the personal one-on-one interactions with your professors, which is so critical to an effective dental education. Your clinical patient care education has a real world structure with group practice teams of students led by general faculty mentors and nationally recognized dental specialist consultants. The diverse student body includes men and women representing a variety of educational and cultural backgrounds, thus adding to the richness of the educational experience. In our Catholic tradition, your education will have a value-centered context of the dental professional's role and responsibilities in the complex society of the 21st century.

The UDM School of Dentistry is dedicated to educating dentists who are:

• patient-centered in their vision of the dental profession:
• ethical, with strong professional values and beliefs:
• competent to provide the highest quality of oral health care, based on their knowledge of science and human behavior:
• skilled in the art of self-evaluation and lifelong learning in a profession whose knowledge base is rapidly and radically changing:
• experienced in community oral health service in a variety of urban practice settings (e.g. long term care facilities for the elderly and physically challenged patient, clinic for the homeless).