(Dec. 12, 2008) Among the more than 700 graduates on the Downtown and Anschutz Medical campuses the past weekend were 20 international dentists earning their U.S. degrees. International dentists are not allowed to practice in the United States without a comparable degree from a U.S. dental school. The foreign-trained dentists completed an intense and customized two-year program: one of only 30 such international programs available throughout the country.
The students on the Downtown and Anschutz campuses are as diverse as the countries they hail from, but their quest to earn their degree is the same. Students such as Constanza (Connie) Cubillos, 34, pictured above, who received her original dentistry degree in her home country of Colombia eight years ago, became a dentist because as a small girl she began to notice that all of her dentists were men. She decided at a young age that she wanted to become a dentist because there were not enough women in the profession and felt that some girls and women might be more comfortable with a female dentist. Cubillos is married to an American electrical engineer and they live here in Denver.
On the Downtown Campus, Hope Shook, 30, College of Arts & Media's Music Industry Studies, graduated as an audio engineer and attended college on the Denver Bound Scholarship for high-merit (academic) out-of-state students. Her family home was destroyed in Mississippi Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina.
Aside from working and taking care of Tyler, her 9-year-old son who is legally blind (and having to learn Braille during her other studies), she has managed to maintain a 3.7 GPA. Her father, right, teaches at the University of Tennessee dental school, and her brother, Nate Powell, left, is in Alabama.
Seyed (Al) Rezaei, 36, is originally from Iran and received his dentistry degree in the Ukraine 10 years ago. His family (parents and siblings) now live in Nevada and, after looking into international programs in the United States, he came to Colorado for the program at UC Denver’s School of Dental Medicine. Rezaei says he is going to stay in Colorado — he loves it here — and the weather and four seasons in Colorado remind him of his home country.