The Student Health Services at Penn has the coolest elevator that I’ve ever seen! It also took me a while to figure out how it actually worked! So you go up to the panel and you select the floor that you want to go to. Then the panel changes to a picture of the elevator bank and shows you what elevator to wait at. One the doors open and you step in, the elevator just takes you to the floor that you selected. I think it’s pretty cool and pretty efficient!  My only concern is what happens if you select the wrong floor ?!?

I’m super excited that the illustrated version of Harry Potter just came out!!! It looks absolutely gorgeous.

Alumni Networking Event

It feels like just yesterday that I went to the annual Penn Alumni Networking Event. Back then, I felt like I hardly knew anyone and I was only speaking to my classmates. But this year, I feel like I’m starting to be part of the Penn Dental family! Also Dr. Hersh (our pharmacology professor) won a service award!

  The class of 2018:
  
    PDM models:
  Liz and I looking fabulous together!

At Trader Joe’s Marla and I found these cinnamon whisks which are absolutely brilliant. They help to infuse cinnamon into your favorite fall beverage! But as we were leaving, we found something even better: a cinnamon broom. A definite must for when we move in together next year!

Penn Hockey

One of the D1s (Ryan) is part of the Penn hockey team and they played Princeton’s team last weekend! Mike, some of the D1s and I decided to go watch the game and support #28! Unfortunately we did end up losing the game (4-3) but we made an amazing comeback from and original 4-0. Ryan was an amazing player and we had tons of fun cheering him on!
  Warming up…

  Defeat:

  The Penn Dental cheer team!

Happy Pumpkin Day!

I can’t believe how time flies by so quickly! We’re already at the next pumpkin carving season! This year I decided to enter two pumpkins! I like having a dental themed pumpkin so I decided to go with braces on my first one:  And since these were supposed to go to the peds clinic when we were done, I also decided on a Tinkerbell design! (Thank you Pinterest for the inspiration!)
  I ended up roping Juan into helping me carve my pumpkins! He did such a great job!!!  He ended up carving Tinkerbell out (I did the stars) and carefully helped excavate the teeth on the braces.   The braces ended up to be really challenging (Juan actually carved around the brackets, I wrapped them in tin foil and then we threaded some ortho wire through the entire thing to hold it all together!) We had a couple of accidents where some of our brackets popped off =(
  Tink looked super cool!   Especially in the dark:
  
And here I am with the pumpkin at the contest! (I took a jab at the senior class since 33 of them applied to ortho programs this year and they haven’t heard back yet!)

We ended up winning the pumpkin carving contest this year which is pretty exciting! My braces pumpkin is now currently sitting in the ortho clinic. They thought it was pretty cute!

Making Some Crowns

Currently in GRD, we’re working on our full metal crowns. Turns out there’s a ton of work involved with making a gold crown. You have to prep the tooth, take an impression, and make a die cast (green stone). Then you have to saw the stone and ditch the die. Finally you get to the stage where you can coat the tooth and make the wax model of the crown. (This is the step that we’re on right now and trust me there are still more steps to come!)

Starting my wax up of my tooth! I know this just looks like a blob of wax but I accidentally smashed my final wax crown so I have to start over =(  I can’t wait to see the final crown!

On October 21st, 2015 we saw a special surprise in Center City:
  There were also people dressed up as Back to the Future characters taking pictures with people. My classmate Sunny got a picture too! But those light up shoes were so cool!
Happy Back to the Future day everyone!

The Lava Scanner

This week in GRD we got a chance to play around with the LAVA scanner which takes a digital impression of a patient’s arches and converts them into a 3D model on the computer. Though it takes a while to take a full scan of the arch, it definitely isn’t as messy as alginate.
Here’s how you take the impression in the mouth:

And this is what shows up on the screen! It actually looks so cool that it looks fake!

And this is the final result:

It actually ended up being more difficult than I thought. The scanner shines really bright LEDs to capture the image so ideally you want to look at the screen and not at the flashing lights. It gets a little difficult trying to redirect the scanner while looking at the screen!

Of course provisional panda also got a scan!

Sadly, the sun has started to set earlier and earlier. Not as beautiful as those sunrises but it’ll do!