So, this month represents a very unique one in my life. It is the first time in 25 years that i will not be in school. That’s a crazy long time! After highschool, I went onto 3 years of microbiology at the University of Saskatchewan, followed by a 5 year dentistry program, then 1 year at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, then 3 years of graduate studies in periodontics. A life like that alone seems busy enough, when one thinks about it.

My time in dental school in Saskatchewan was great. I had incredible classmates, with excellent professors. I am not being facetious when I say that Saskatchewan has the best undergraduate dental program in the country! We had clinical requirements which were 10 times that of many other Canadian schools. I was happy to be in a tight-knit class of 25 students. Here is a picture taken probably 8 years ago with my best buddy in school, Steven Rempel (who is a dentist now in Peterborough). We were learning how to put braces on our classmates.

The residency at Mount Sinai was probably the most exciting year of my life. It was also the most challenging. Not only was this little prairie boy trying to find his place in the “big city”, we were incredibly busy. There were days where we residents would get 3 hours of sleep. I have so many exciting stories from my experiences in the hospital. My class was again an incredible one, and we all helped each other out and stayed positive. Because of this, we became respected residents of the emergency room floor. I even met one of the ER doctors a few months later, and he admitted to us that we were busier than even the medical residents! Here’s a picture of some of my fellow mates, along with Dr. Sigal, our program head.

Finally, there was perio school. Everytime you head into a new program, things get busier and more challenging. The difficulty I found with perio school was trying to combine my ever-increasingly busy piano life. When I qualified for the International Chopin Competition, I was actually hesitant to tell anyone in the program. The department head at the time, Dr. Howard Tenenbaum, found out by seeing the news online...he came up to me at school and said “I’ll kill you if you don’t go to Warsaw!”. What kind words, haha. I remember one time when Bravo TV and Sing Tao News came to the school to interview me. It was always really cool but also a bit embarrassing to have media follow you around. By the way, that pose in the picture below was not my idea!

I always felt at home with the faculty and staff in Toronto, and was always proud to tell them good news from abroad. They were as supportive as those back home in Saskatchewan. My fellow residents are now all dispersed around Ontario. I hope we all stay connected to some degree. We were close, like family and it’s hard sometimes to part so quickly after graduation. Congratulations to everyone!!!