I got into dentistry actually as a second career. I was a high school math teacher first and I always had a passion for teaching even when I was a student myself. When I caught on to something I wanted to help other students so I loved teaching but just found it wasn’t the lifelong career that I thought it would be.

So once I realized that I had always had an interest in started exploring what could that look like for me and honestly I shadowed my own dentist and just fell in love with what her day-to-day looked like. I love that she was helping people, she had a variety of things she could do, she worked with a close-knit team and in a very different environment was still teaching people. So I’ve just kind of grown to find even more things I love about it now that I am a dentist and it is just fantastic getting to see patients smile, getting to make a more comfortable experience for them because most people say they don’t love coming to see me.

I didn’t anticipate that part of my job but it is wonderful when you finally gain their trust and help them feel more at ease in your office. I went to undergrad in Bowling Green Ohio and then went to dental school at Ohio State University, the Ohio State University I should say and once I got into dentistry it was kind of just some sporadic continuing ed, just kind of whatever I could get my hands on, learning the soft tissue laser, learning different materials, techniques but then I really found a passion to build upon doing more full mouth treatment which then kind of put me into this tunnel of learning more and more about TMJ pain and how to treat patients. It’s very different pathways and a lot of that was through a group called the Dawson Academy and I went through a mini residency with them in St. Pete Florida and still continue to do some webinars with them along the way.

Right now Dr. Maggie and myself are actually in a study club through another group called Spear and we meet with specialists around Cincinnati and we go over cases together so it’s been a really fantastic experience. We’re not only just learning more in terms of procedures, techniques but we’re learning better how to collaborate with specialists that we are sending our patients to and how to make that treatment more cohesive from start to finish. Dental school is four years long and you learn a lot but you do not learn everything and even when you’re learning it you’re learning some of it before you’ve even treated a patient and so now that I’ve treated so many patients I’m seeing these things it’s almost like I can look back and start connecting the dots so it makes so much more sense now with years of experience to learn more about these things but on top of that dentistry is changing I would say nearly day by day.

There are new products, new materials, just new ways of refining sequencing works better so if you don’t do the continuing education you’re going to fall behind. I mean it’s similar with technology if you don’t start paying attention to how to implement technology, like you are going to be behind and what is required of us is I would say not nearly enough continuing ed hours to really keep up with all of the changes.