Pace setters: Graduate profiles
On Tuesday nights, when other students were hitting the books or meeting a friend at Starbucks, Rocky Bozak was among a group of dentistry students performing volunteer work at the Reach Community Health Centre Dental Clinic on Vancouver's East side.
Bozak is part of a long tradition of service in the Faculty of Dentistry.
The clinic is a private facility on Commercial Drive funded by the Ministry of Health. The patients are often in pain, some don't speak English, and treatment is sometimes complicated by HIV infection or intravenous drug use.
"It's a real eye-opener for dentistry students," says Bozak.
"It's a good learning opportunity, too. You not only learn about life on the other side of the fence, but you learn to work quickly and deal with people. A little bit of psychology is involved."
UBC dentistry students volunteer their time year-round at the clinic, from 6:30 to 11 p.m. Tuesday nights.
The clinic is just one of the ways that dentistry students serve the public. A free clinic for disadvantaged children is held on campus as is the faculty's main clinic, where supervised students perform dental work at a fraction of the cost of professional dentists.
As well as volunteering at clinics, Bozak also served as the president of the Dentistry Undergraduate Society and held several other positions with student organizations.
He also contributed to a faculty committee that developed the problem-based learning curriculum recently put in place for the first- and second-year medical and dental school.
Bozak will fulfil a long-time dream of working in the health sciences when he joins an established dental practice in Vernon this summer.
"I like the hands-on approach," he says. "There's lot of diagnosis involved -- sometimes the first signs of liver problems, AIDS, leukemia and other cancers will be discovered by a dentist -- and a little bit of surgery."