ADEA 2018 Fall Session Reflection #3

Overall, I was extremely impressed by the ADEA Fall meeting and how organized ADEA as a whole is. I only recently became involved with ADEA last year when I joined the Executive Board, so I was unaware of the multitude of councils that exist, including the Council of Students, Residents, and Fellows (COSRF), Council of Deans, Council of Faculties, and many more! I appreciated that there were tailored presentations and talks for each council, because it made the experience that much more worthwhile to know I was learning about things directly pertinent to me.  For example, the presentation about how to pay back loans through public service was a new discovery! The average national dental student debt is $285,184, so it was incredibly relieving to hear about another way to pay back debt that would also benefit the community. I have always been passionate about community dentistry and I have been looking for ways into community dentistry that would be a financially viable option. The Public service loan repayment program is exactly that!

I also thought that the two lunch plenary sessions were particularly thought provoking. The first session was called “What’s next in Health Care and Higher Education”, which described the trends seen in dentistry and dental educators. Dr. Valachovic’s use of diagrams, charts, and infographics really helped nail the point home that dentistry is becoming more diverse overall in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity! This was especially inspiring to hear because healthcare as a whole needs more representation and this was a positive step in achieving that. Dr. Valachovic then went on to describe the different career paths that new dental graduates undertake. Unsurprisingly, private practice and dental residency were the two highest activities, at 47.9% and 35.9% respectively in 2018. However, I was shocked to learn that less than 10% of graduates work in the public sector, including Federally Qualified Health Centers, federal service, nonprofits, or state/local government employees! Even more so, only 0.3% of students went to become a faculty or staff member at a dental school! That last statistic had a lasting impact on me, because if so few of the new generations of dentists are willing to teach, who will continue on the dental education when the older faculty retire? What will become of dental schools if no one is willing to teach? That was the moment I really realized how valuable and how important having an organization like ADEA was. ADEA is “the voice of dental education” and it’s up to all of its members nationwide to take strides to improve dental education in all facets. As a student and as a post-graduate chair at our chapter, I am more motivated to provide career resources about dental educators to UCSF students! More so now than ever, it is necessary that we begin training and cultivating the next batch of dentists who will shape the future curriculums of dentistry. It will not be easy to create a shift in this trend, but if every COSRF student went back to their chapters and held one event to expose their student community to dental education, then slowly but surely I think we can change this!

ADEA 2018 Fall Session Reflection #2

The national ADEA chapter is growing fast. With the help of established chapters, like UCSF in the Council of Students, Residents, and Fellows, ADEA local chapters have been coming to fruition across multiple dental schools. Forty-eight of the sixty-six US dental schools to be exact. How has this process been stream-lined? By coming together and combining all the successful tips and tricks from all the local chapters into a handy document called a ADEA Chapter Toolkit for Students, Residents and Fellows. This page on the ADEA website is a result of ideations at the Fall and Annual Meetings. The benefit of this website has been priceless as its helped many of the new chapters get a strong foundation, and helped older chapters get new ideas to help promote dental education and ADEA as a whole. UCSF’s local student chapter is one of the longest standing chapters in ADEA. Our contribution into the toolkit has been ample ideas of events that have had successful outcomes and helped our students understand what dental academia looks like and can provide.

What does UCSF plan on doing with this toolkit? We hope to continue to build on it from our local chapter, extrapolate ideas from it, and collaborate more with other local schools to help build camaraderie! With Loma Linda University starting their new chapter, UCLA going into their third year of their chapter, and UOP looking for ways to get more students involved, UCSF has been able to help by being in close proximity and on the same time zone! As of now, one of our mini goals within the local chapter is combining events with our cross town school to give our students a mix of academic taste in the private school and public school setting. We foresee this being a benefit to our students as many of them always have questions about private school and public school environments!

Our local chapter will continue to host events for our students that have had continuous positive feedback in the past. We are also putting all hands on deck in supporting Western University as they are hosting the next West Coast Dental Hack-a-thon that was started by one of our very own here last year at UCSF. This year, we anticipate having a equal number of students from all district 11 schools to attend as well as students from schools in district 9. Our chapter growth and new ideas could not have been possible if we didn’t have our enthusiastic ADEA members attend meetings like Fall and Annual. Our eager students continue to be excited about what’s to come for ADEA and dental academia. What better way to learn and hear about it than from the creators and the backbone of dental education themselves?

ADEA 2018 Fall Session Reflection #1

This past October, my colleagues and I had the wonderful opportunity to head to ADEA’s first ever international Fall Session, held in Ontario, Canada. What a great experience it was to be part of this new venture of ADEA into Canada and immerse myself in this dynamic field of education and change. Our UCSF groups had a warm welcome from the cohort of dental students from Toronto and we were lucky to be involved in one of the highest attended fall sessions of ADEA’s Council of Students, Residents and Fellows (COSRF) in years. Last year I was grateful to have the opportunity to attend the Fall Session for the first time, and I left feeling invigorated and feeling very connected to ADEA and our mission as a national organization. This year, I have the pleasure of serving on our District’s newfound cabinet as District Deputy Commissioner, and as such I had a completely different lens going into Fall Session. With a better overall understanding of ADEA, our vision as a District, and our goals and accomplishments as a chapter, I was able to step back and spend more of my time connecting to other students from other schools and personally speak with them about new ways they can continue growing their chapters. I also had such a fun time observing our second-year students from UCSF branch out, network, and progressively see their passion for ADEA grow throughout the course of the weekend. We left with many new ideas for fundraising and improving current events that we hold and created new platforms for collaboration with other chapters nearby. ADEA on the west coast, and in particular within District 11 is continuing to grow, and UCSF definitely continues to set the gold standard. I am so proud of UCSF ADEA for setting such a great example of chapter accomplishments, and happy to see the level of engagement our attendees had throughout the event. I feel confident about the next generation of dental educators, as well as our leadership at the local level for years to come.

Dinner With 8 Strangers

When Sammi Yu ‘20 pitched the idea of “Dinner With 8 Strangers” to me, I just knew I had to say yes! As a relatively new addition to the School of Dentistry faculty, I jumped at the opportunity to spend some time with a small group of dental students outside of school and away from the responsibilities of patient care. Even though each UCSF predoctoral class is relatively small (85 degree candidates per year is small compared to the 280 in my D1 class at NYU!), four years is hardly enough time to get to know all of my students as well as I’d like to, especially when at least 50% of that time is spent giving out Axium swipes. Plus, there would be FOOD involved in this experience. How could I say no?

On Friday, May 4th, my eight strangers and I made our way to Buffalo Theory with inflatable light sabers in tow. (Why the light sabers, you ask? Because Star Wars Day! May the Fourth Be With You!) Over the next few hours, we shared small plates, big laughs, and our most outrageous dental school stories and memories. Since most of my time at UCSF is spent with D3s and D4s in the predoc clinic, it was awesome to be able to hear the D1s and D2s reflect on their dental school experience so far and listen as the senior students offered insight and advice on how to successfully navigate the next two years of their training. We finished up the night by heading down the street to grab some freshly baked doughnuts at Bob’s Donuts. What a treat! Many thanks to the UCSF ADEA student group for arranging this event. I look forward to taking out another group of 8 Strangers next time!

HSOC 2018 Recap

On April 28th, 2018 UCSF hosted the 15th annual High School Outreach Conference (HSOC) for over 300 Bay Area high school students. HSOC is an event put on by the UCSF ADEA student chapter as well as the HSOC inter-professional planning committee made up of students from all the different professional schools at UCSF. The purpose of the event is to allow high school students to get exposed to the wide variety of healthcare and research fields UCSF has to offer, in hopes that the students are inspired to pursue a career in healthcare someday. High school is a great time to freely explore interests before going to college and having to choose a major and make career decisions. Therefore, our hope is that students who attend the conference find a field they’re passionate about, or at least can eliminate some they are less interested in pursuing to make the decision-making process a little easier.

The students arrived early in the morning and picked up their free T-shirt, goodie bag, and info packet for the day before enjoying breakfast. Then, we kicked off the morning with an inspiring talk from our student speaker, Talita Oseguera (RN, Nurse Midwife/Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner c/o 2019), who talked to the students about her journey from high school to where she is now. She also provided some great insights on how the journey can be more difficult for people who are under-represented in healthcare but encouraged the students to pursue whatever they are passionate about, even if there are not many people who look like them in that field. After Talita’s wonderful talk, it was time for the students to break up in their rotation groups to go to stations put on by seven different professional programs at UCSF including Dentistry, Medicine, Pharmacy, Physical Therapy, Nursing, Graduate Studies, and Clinical Lab Sciences.

Dentistry: Students got a hands-on view of the dental field by taking impressions and pouring up molds of a tooth, as well as getting to drill a “cavity” out of a plastic tooth and then fill it with light curing composite material.

Medicine: Radiology technicians demonstrated how ultrasound machines work and the students also got to try! Additionally, medical students brought some specimens in so the high schoolers could examine real human organs including a heart and brain.

Pharmacy: The students learned about the various careers available to pharmacists as well as how they fill prescriptions and count pills. They also got an introduction to compound pharmacy and participated in a demonstration where they compounded lotion from household items.

Physical Therapy: A lot of activities and exercises took place at the PT demo where students learned about prescribing exercise therapy, how to stabilize and support the musculoskeletal system, and other tasks that physical therapists perform.

Nursing: Nurses bring a holistic approach to patient care and at this station the students learned how to do full body assessments and take vital signs including measuring heart rate and blood pressure.

Graduate Studies: The students became researchers at this station as they extracted DNA from both a strawberry and their own cheek, and then compared the two to analyze their similarities and differences.

Clinical Lab Sciences: Clinical Lab Scientists process and analyze specimens from the hospital. The students got a tour of the various departments including the chemistry, hematology, and microbiology laboratories.

When the students had each visited every rotation station, they all reconvened to hear from the keynote speaker, Dr. Daniel Lowenstein. He is a medical doctor as well as the current Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at UCSF, and we were very honored and excited to have him as a speaker this year. With his great ability to capture an audience’s attention, he detailed his non-linear path to the medical field as an example to the students that you may not know what career you are passionate about in high school and that is okay. But eventually, and in your own unique way, you’ll discover what makes you happy and pursue it.

Overall it was an exciting and high energy day for the students filled with inspiring speakers as well as hands on activities to give them a taste of the different healthcare fields UCSF has to offer. On the evaluation forms, almost every high school student indicated that after attending the conference they were more likely to pursue a career in healthcare than before the conference. This was great feedback for the planning committee and very encouraging as that is always our goal and the reason we work so hard to make it a great day. Year after year this conference is a fun way to come together with the other professional schools to inspire the next generation of healthcare professionals and to remember why we chose the career path that we did. We are already looking forward to planning another successful HSOC next year!