My experience in the Master’s of Pharmacology program at Tulane School of Medicine has been very pleasant so far. Coming from the largest university in the nation, I have never been in a class this small before. Most of my classes in my undergraduate were between 100 and 300 people. This is an advantage for me as it allows the students and faculty to get to know each other more easily.

I am unlike the other students in the class, however. Rather than applying for medical school this cycle, I have applied for dental school. I believe this program will benefit me greatly even though I am not applying for medical school. I have talked with colleagues currently in dental school who state that they are learning the same material and have a complete medical pharmacology course in dental school. Some people say this is one of the tougher subjects to master in dental school, so I am happy that I will have a leg up on the competition when I eventually get in.

One thing I wish that the program could improve on would be to offer more pharmacologic information related directly to dentistry. The program is advertised as a Master’s Program that will improve prospective medical students’ resumes as well as prospective dental students’ resumes. However, there is an obvious correlation with medical school in the curriculum and not much correlation with dental school. I am aware that Tulane does not have a dental school, but I still think it would be appropriate to offer more information for prospective dental school students. I am not sure exactly how they could improve this aspect of the program, but a few possible ways would be:

-Offer dates/times of seminars or learning labs that LSU Dental offers

-Possibly set up an agreement type of deal with LSU dental about getting involved clinically at the dental school, whether that be shadowing, dental assistant training, or various other dental related experiences that could improve one’s resume (a great example of this would be at Temple University. They have a program very similar to this except during the summer before the 1-year program starts, they give the prospective dental students the option to be trained as a dental assistant at their clinic, which they can then earn volunteer hours throughout the semester working in the clinic while acquiring valuable experiences. I applied to this program but decided not to attend due to the price difference).

Again, I am not sure how possible that would be to implement at this school, since they do not have a dental school themselves, but I have heard that they have some ties to the LSU School of Dental Medicine.