Hi, my name is Geroge Veit and I am chair of the Dental Hygiene Department here at UVSC. I am happy to have this opportunity to speak with you about our department. Let me give you a little background on myself. I am a dentist by education and I also have a degree in education. I practiced many years in dentistry back east. I realized that a very very important part of health care is prevention and education and that is one of the main things that lead me into moving from private practice to education and being here at UVSC in the Dental Hygiene department. As you may have heard, we have a wonderful hygiene program and department here at Utah Valley State College. We have a relatively small class. We have twenty eight students at one time. In many ways that is a good thing because we have a wonderful faculty to student ratio. In other words, when you are in your classroom and the teacher is up there discussing things with you, you will have one teacher and fourteen students, including yourself in the classroom. It is even better when you are in the clinic. You will have yourself and thirteen other students in a clinic session. You will have one Dentist in that clinic session, helping you and three to four Hygiene instructors helping you. I feel that the personal attention and great ratio is one of the reasons for the great success in our program, that our students achieve every year. Another wonderful thing about our program is just the high level of quality and again I think this is related to that ratio, to the dedicated faculty and staff and to the wonderful students we get. To brag a little bit, every year our students take the National Dental Hygiene Boards and out of over 260 programs, nationwide, our students have placed number five twice, number ten and three nationwide out of all those other programs. I´m a little excited too because I just got the news about our students taking the Western Regional Exam Test boards in local anesthesia. Every year we have a 100% pass rate. We just found out that they jut took that last week. So, another great thing they have done.

Our program is very competitive. We have five pre-requisites and I don´t expect that will change over time. We have English 1010, Math 1050, and Chemistry for the Health Sciences, Human Anatomy, and Human Physiology. Those are the five pre-requisites. We also look at either an ACT or an SAT score and also at a test we call the Health Occupations Aptitude Test. This test is administered here at UVSC Testing Center or if need be, can be taken at a distance location. What we do is look at the grades and the test scores and assign admissions points. The fourteen applicants with the highest number of points are offered acceptance into the program.

We have some new exciting things coming into our program. We are introducing this year, digital radiology. We are trying to keep up-to-date in our program and at the cutting edge of technology. With grant money, we just installed a Digital Radiography system. We also have some new cavity detecting devises that use lasers. We really feel that our students are well prepared to go into the workforce. Right now there is still a very good demand for Hygienists out there. All of our students that graduated last year (Spring 2005) found positions, for those who wanted to work. We foresee that down the line there will be good job opportunities for Hygienists as well and good salaries associated with the jobs.