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A Special Place

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As a result of these and other initiatives, NYUCD today is widely recognized as an innovator in clinical education, patient care, research, and community services designed to better serve our students, our patients, and the surrounding community.

NYUCD's ability to innovate is possible because of a unique set of assets. One is size and the impact that comes with it. NYUCD is the largest dental school in the United States and the most comprehensive oral healthcare center in the world. A second asset is our extraordinary global reach. NYUCD boasts a level of national and international diversity unmatched by other dental schools. A third asset is our location in New York City, the world's capital city, which allows us to leverage both the media and industry in ways that other dental schools cannot do. Equally important, NYUCD is part of a great research university and has become a key player in building NYU’s research core.

But it is our students who are our greatest asset. Students are what make us a university and not simply a clinical service center or a research institute. Students are central to our identity as a university and a college. Giving students top priority means three things: first, that we will help them achieve technical excellence in dentistry and are committed to providing the time, energy, and resources to bring them a first-rate clinical education. Second, it means that our graduates will identify themselves as men and women of science; that is, as sophisticated consumers of research. Not every graduate has to become a scientist, in the sense of becoming a producer of new knowledge, but a learned profession does require that every graduate become an intelligent user of research, comfortable with the structure and syntax of modern biomedical science and critical thinking. Third, that we help students acquire emotional intelligence, by role modeling it for them, because we recognize that the way students are treated is central to how they will treat others, especially their patients.

When you couple this approach to students with a very progressive curriculum, state-of-the art facilities, access to the largest, most culturally diverse pool of patients in the nation, and a superb research program, you have all the ingredients for a special learning environment.