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Background Information Pre-Dental Society Website

PDS Irvine New Shirt, Flyer, Banner Design, and more!

The new school year is about to begin! I have spent this second half of the summer working full-time at a dental office and getting everything ready for our organization, Pre-Dental Society at UC Irvine. I did a ton of work in Adobe Illustrator designing logos, fliers, banners, t-shirts, and emblems. It was really important to make all these because of our recent commitment to rebranding the organization from ground zero.

Here are digital previews of what I have designed in the past few weeks:

Flyers

 

Banner

 

Shirts

 

New PDS Letterhead Logo

 

 

I spent a ton of time in Illustrator and learned its inner workings. I have gotten to the point where I can effortlessly design something in a very painless way. I ended up going back to some of my old art work and re-did them. I redid the AlmazDentistry logo which now feels much more professional with a crisper design and a fresh set of colors.

 

Unofficial Dentistry Logo

 

 

New Almaz Dentistry Logo

 

As you can see we have been hard at work getting everything ready for the 2012-2013 school year. Come check out our website at www.clubs.uci.edu/pds/ to learn more about what Pre-Dental Society at UC Irvine can do for you. We meet odd Tuesdays at 5:00PM in NS2 4201.

This upcoming week is going to be super busy! Mark Hunt will be offering a tooth waxing course on Saturday at UC Irvine. Sunday I will be attending Care Harbor, a clinic in Los Angeles, similar to that of the CDA Cares event a few weeks ago. Have a great year everybody!

Categories
Advice Dental Assistant Dental School Pre-Dental Society Tips Website

Introducing the Ultimate List of Pre-Dental Resources

Hey everybody!

After seeing the popularity of the post Recommended Resources for Pre-Dental Students, I decided to release the full list of resources!

Today we celebrate the release of the Ultimate List of Pre-Dental Resources! The list can be found at the top of the website in between “Ask Elias” and “Portfolio“. It contains many of the links I have looked through and collected over the years. I would highly recommend using it to its full potential. There is much more information there than I will be able to relay on AlmazDentistry.com.

The plan is to keep the list growing as I discover new resources. I also hope to figure out a way of making it much more organized. Currently I am looking into organizing using buttons or hover-over text-boxes. If you have any recommended links of your own, please send them through “Ask Elias”! Of course, you will be credited for your find!

The list will also be going onto AlmazDensitry’s sister website Pre-Dental Society at UC Irvine so keep on the look out!

Have a great weekend!

Categories
Advice Dental Assistant Pre-Dental Society Tips

CDA Cares Sacramento 2012

This past weekend the CDA ran a free clinic titled CDA Cares at Cal Expo in Sacramento, CA. CDA Cares is a collaborative effort between the California Dental Association (CDA), the CDA Foundation, the Missions of Mercy, and the dozens of sponsors of the event. CDA Cares strives to provide free dental care to Californians in need.

Stephen O’Donnell, the president of the Pre-Dental Society at UC Irvine, and I volunteered both days at the clinic in every way we could. Throughout the two days we got the opportunity to guide patients around, assist with hygiene and extractions, and take x-rays. The event was an excellent place for pre-dental students to network, learn, and have a great time with other dental professionals. Volunteers kept the atmosphere cheery and efficiently worked to achieve a organization record breaking 1,100+ treated patients per day. This is truly an AMAZING accomplishment! To put that into perspective, the organization typically averages 1,500 patients across two days.

Throughout the experience, we met amazing new people like Dr. Craig S. Yarborough, the Associate Dean of the University of the Pacific Dental School, ran into old acquaintances, and got to work with dental companies who sponsored the event. We were shocked to see that while there were hundreds of dental professionals hard at work, there were hundreds more of volunteers who had no relation to dentistry and attended the event for the benefit of the community. Everybody was working together so efficiently!

Volunteering at this clinic has really opened up my eyes as to how many people in California do not have access to dental care. It is estimated that one in three individuals in California do not have access to dental care. We have learned through this experiences that some of these individuals truly care about their oral hygiene and will go to great lengths to get the dental help they need. Many of these people waited outside of Cal Expo for OVER 24 hours in order to get dental treatment.

If you get the chance, we would highly encourage coming out to one of these events so you can experience it firsthand. Everybody is friendly and you will not be asked to do anything you do not feel comfortable doing. If there is anything you have never done before, all you have to do is ask and most doctors will get a thrill out of getting to teach a future dental student a few pointers.

If you are interested in participating in a future event we plan to keep all PDS Irvine members updated by posting these events on the facebook group page. To Check out more photos from this event please visit our photo gallery for the event!

Categories
ASDA Pre-Dental Society Website

Introducing the Pre-Dental Society of UC Irvine

Hello everybody, I would like to introduce the new Pre-Dental Society of UC Irvine!

After some discussion we decided to rename the UC Irvine pre-dental club, previously named American Student Dental Association at UC Irvine (ASDA@UCI), to Pre-Dental Society of UC Irvine. The decision of a name change came due to several reasons. The first being the fact that most other pre-dental clubs at universities use the name “Pre-Dental Society”. This change would improve our clubs visibility to pre-health students across campus through the use of a standardized and easily recognizable name.

The second reason is because we are not associated to ASDA (a pretty big deal!). I learned this my freshman year during my interview for the pre-dental board. I asked how our $30 dollar membership fees managed to cover our costs as well as ASDA member registration fees which are roughly $50 dollars. The interviewers told me that we were not actually associated to the organization. Later on, out of curiosity, I researched how the club ended up using the organization’s name and I learned that in 1999 the American Student Dental Association started a program to bring undergraduate chapters to universities. The program flopped and as a result it was completely abandoned by ASDA. Details about what caused the program’s termination have been difficult to find since this occurred over 10 years ago.

Schools were expected to switch their names from ASDA, but, apparently, it was never enforced strictly. By 2012, most organizations switched over to “Pre-Dental Society” with our own UCI club being one of the few exceptions nationally. After learning about my new position on the next years board, I spoke to the other 2012-2013 board members and we decided that it was time we left the ASDA name behind and moved on to become the Pre-Dental Society of UC Irvine. While this move may result in losing some connections with contacts we have accumulated over the years, it also has the benefit of making it easier for dental-career-curious individuals to find us. Since helping other students is what we are here to do, this is a very important benefit to us!

Another side effect of the name change was the fact that nearly everything we have must be redone to accommodate the new name. Everything from our website to our constitution needed to be rewritten to reflect our new name and goals of the organization. I took on the task of building the new website because of my long history building websites. Immediately following finals,  I started extensively working on these projects. After nearly 20 days of coding, debugging, repeat, I would like to announce the new website for the Pre-Dental Society of UC Irvine!

I find the website design to be very professional looking which is important for a pre-health organization, and I am particularly proud of the adaptable structure of the website that allows a fairly significant modification of content using a drag and drop interface. Keeping the website editing simple is important just in case next year’s board (or the one after that) has no web experience.

There is still a ton of work to do as part of the name change process, but I really enjoy doing it. The more I refine our documents, the more I realize that this review needed to be done someday. Many of our documents are the victims of poor editing throughout nearly a decade and as a result have lost their professionalism.

Now that much of the work is done on the new website, I will be back on here writing more frequently! I am looking forward to writing several new blog posts throughout the summer. If you are waiting for a specific topic, please submit a request through my Ask Elias page and I will be sure to write it!

Have a great weekend!

P.S. Get those Dental School Applications in! July is almost here!