Lasting Impressions | Fall 2014

10 © LASTING IMPRESSIONS “We are ready for them to go ahead and take our good name out into the community and be our ambassadors for good dental health.” — Hal Lippman more about what that entailed before com- mitting. So she applied for a nonmedical job checking in patients at the college’s dental clinic. She eventually left that job to concen- trate on completing her undergraduate degree, but her former boss asked her to return as a dental clinic patient care coor- dinator. That experience was the deciding factor. She learned she could handle patients who were upset or didn’t want to be there, communicate well with them, and establish a good relationship. “That is when I knew that [being a den- tist] is what I wanted to do,” she said. “I knew I could do this.” Now Bernal, a native of Colombia, has begun to work on an advanced degree in periodontics at the University of Tennessee. “A periodontist is responsible for helping you save your teeth,” she said. “Being able to do that is very gratifying.” Being a dental student became aston- ishing good luck for Uyen Nguyen, who began a nearly three-year orthodontics program at West Virginia University a month after graduating from the CDM. She was part of an NSU class that was learning how to conduct oral cancer screenings when a classmate examining her spotted a lesion on her palate. An NSU pathologist diagnosed a carcinoma, and two NSU oral surgeons removed it in 2012. She then underwent radiation treatment. Nguyen, 31, said the oral screening spotted the cancer while it could still be treated successfully. “It was so far back in my mouth, I never would have seen it for myself,” she said. The surgery and radiation “set me back a lot,” she said. “I was weak. There were times I could not attend school.” But her classmates rallied to her side. They took notes for her in class, visited,