A Grin to Bear It

It's been a busy month and a half here at Midwestern University in Glendale. In the Office of Communications, we hit the "perfect storm" in our publishing cycle as soon as spring arrives - between writing for upcoming publications, reviewing publications in approvals, and shepherding approved pubs to print, we have more than our share of Maalox moments.

Fortunately, part of our responsibility is media outreach and relations, and that means that in addition to our publication cycle we also involve ourselves in many of the University's events. It's nice to be part of events like Cuts for Kids or the recent Give Kids a Smile event put on by the College of Dental Medicine-Arizona to help us feel a connection to the generous giving spirit of our student body.

This was CDMA's inaugural Give Kids a Smile event, but with the hard work and dedication put in by the student and faculty organizers, you would have thought they had been doing it for years. CDMA faculty and students treated 260 Phoenix-area children at the Midwestern University Dental Institute on Saturday, April 2^nd, providing over $96,000 worth of free dental services, as well as offering important education about dental health to the children's families.

I'm coming up on six months of employment at Midwestern University, and I am continually astonished by how many charitable activities go on here. Put all of the extracurricular community service together with these students' studies and classes, and you might wonder - as I do - if these people ever sleep. But the commitment is genuine and so is the desire to help other people.

It's something I'm thankful for in these days of editorial review and red ink. When you spend days cloistered in an office, hunched over a computer keyboard or thumbing through a sea of yellow highlighter and copy editing symbols, it's nice to get out once in a while and see our students putting smiles on others' faces.

That, friends, is job satisfaction.