My best character traits are my creativity, ability to problem solve, and empathize. My friends know that they can usually call me with any problem, whether personal like an issue with a partner, or difficulty articulating an overarching concept for a thesis or help with naming a new company, my friends know that they can call me, and I will generally stop whatever I’m doing to spend and hour or 2 consulting with them to try and solve their problem.

My organization as a dentist relies heavily on the interplay between digital and analog workflows. The first step of my organization process involves an app called “Todoist” which has natural language processing and AI so I type every “to do” item in my life (from as small as reminding myself to take vitamins and make the bed every day to more complex like contacting patients and studying specific topics for exams)  into it and it generates a list of To-Dos for my day. Then before I go to bed every night I go through my to-do list and use the “Eisenhower Matrix” also known as the “urgent/important” matrix to try and organize what I can actually get done with my limited time as a dental student.

What makes me a unique member of a GPR class would be my experience with an extensive and diverse work and life experience before coming to dental school. I think this gives me a unique ability to connect with a diversity of patients and empathize with people from all backgrounds.

Criticism was deeply interwoven in my training as a designer. In nearly every class, multiple times a week we had to post our work around a room and criticize each other. After a year of that I became calloused towards criticism and learned to shrug it off, because that was supposed to prepare us for working in the professional design world, where you can do amazing work, and the client can shoot it down or criticize it with no reason necessary. This training also forced me to become very critical of myself to prepare me for any outside criticism I could experience.

I chose dentistry after exploring a bunch of different careers because I wanted a job that involved being creative and running a business but had a direct positive impact on people. I thought being a healthcare provider was the most straightforward way to impact people, it provided a direct way to take someone sick and make them better. Dentistry specifically seemed to have the best combination of being creative (or at least doing something with my hands), maybe owning a business and being able to take someone who is in pain to health relatively quickly. In that light, my philosophy of dentistry centers around trying to position dental care as an accessible consumer good, like I have done in previous careers. I believe that dentistry is positioned as an elite service for “luxury bones' ' and that there is a way to practice and deliver care that is patient, forward, affordable and universal, like the retailer, Target.

The thing that keeps most centered in life is training and “competing” in triathlons. I use the term “compete” loosely because I’m not naturally athletic and I’m rarely in contention for placing on the podium, but that is what keeps me centered: working for a goal and improving, but not having to be the best. In a lot of my life I try to be a perfectionist and am very had on myself when things don’t go well, the triathlons remind me that I can’t always be perfect and that usually there is going to be someone better than me at something, but also sometimes I can be better than other people at some things, and also that no matter how much I train or plan, something can go wrong (such as at a competition this past summer where I got a flat tire during the bike portion, my best event, and ended up finishing second to last)

When it comes to difficult or challenging clinical situations, my initial inclination is to just rely on my experience and intuition to power through and figure out a solution. Now though when I experience a challenging clinical situation I always try to ask whoever is attending because I realized this is a rare opportunity to have access to experts to get their advice for challenging clinical situations.

For most of my career before dental school, I was hired because of my visual communication and storytelling abilities. Because I have a lisp and stutter, my spoken communication is really only okay and to communicate while speaking I usually have to speak pretty slowly or my words get mixed up. Despite this I have a very strong visual sense and ability to synthesize concepts and into images and words. To that end I spend a lot of time trying to develop visual communications for common explanations. For example last year I developed a website: http://www.okay.dentist to send to prospective patients with an explanation of the idiosyncrasies of being a patient at The Ohio State’s College of Dentistry

I try to exhibit a mature and stable persona by generally being quiet and listening. In the realm of dental school I know that I’m not an expert in dentistry especially so I try to just observe and absorb as much as possible and try not to get involved in anything that doesn’t improve my journey.

To me, professionalism means exhibiting the ideal standard of whatever it is that you are doing. For example, one of the difficulties I find with being in dental school is the difficulty in fulfilling what the patients’ expect from a professional dental practice, because a lot of those aspects are out of my control, such as efficient scheduling. But I try to exhibit professionalism by having a website with relevant information that I think patient’s would expect from a real dental practice.

I think I’m a pretty self-aware student considering that I’ve been a student for 14 years through undergrad, graduate school, undergrad again and now dental school, I’ve come to understand my strengths and weaknesses as a student. My strengths include projects, presentations, and papers, my weaknesses include incredible test anxiety. I’ve known throughout my education that tests, quizzes, anything where I have to provide one correct answer from memory has always been difficult because I generally work / thrive in environments where there are numerous correct answers. To this end I am always exploring new study and test-taking techniques and try not to beat myself up about middling test performance because I can’t be the best at everything.

I’m naturally an integrative thinker which means that I spend a lot of time learning about a large variety of seemingly disparate concepts and then trying to figure out ways to connect them into new ideas. My creativity is usually driven by a need to problem solve. I like to be given a goal, or prompt, especially if it’s difficult or impossible and try to develop dozens of ways to make the seemingly impossible, possible. This often means doing lots of small experiments with a mix of outlandish and realistic concepts and seeing what fails and what succeeds.

A GPR would be beneficial to me because I have promised the United States Army Reserves for the next 10 years that I would be on call if needed by the country to serve as a soldier and dentist if called upon. I believe that a GPR would provide the most beneficial training outside of the last 4 years to treat complex cases, surgeries, and emergencies. Further, the GPR speaks to the larger goal of why I wanted to become a dentist: helping whoever needs it. GPR programs train you to treat more complex cases, especially those not often seen in private practice, and I want to be able to see those cases rarely seen in private practice and rarely have to turn people away.

I try to exhibit social responsibility by trying to be a benefit to others and sacrifice when needed. For example, I’ve been a bike commuter nearly every day for the last 10 years because it’s a way to reduce my carbon footprint for future generations, even if it means biking in the rain or cold sometimes. I also try to sign up for whatever I can that can provide a direct benefit, 10 years ago I read about the need for people who are minorities to sign up for the bone marrow registry. I signed up and was immediately matched with a very young patient with leukemia. I needed to take some time off from my job to go through the surgery. The job threatened to fire me because I didn’t have enough vacation time. I ended up going through the bone marrow donation process and losing my job, but I thought that was a fair trade to give hope to a family.

My default leadership style is democratic which means when working in a team I like to try and find a consensus amongst everyone in the team to work together towards a common goal. I think to have a successful team, everyone on the team has to have a stake in the final goal. My default is to always try and create scenarios for the team that are win-win for everyone.

I think my strengths in dentistry are really the skills relevant to dentistry that aren't really taught in school. I have a lot of experience with marketing and managing business teams and creating consumer-centric products and services. I think this will provide me a lot of benefits as a dentist because a lot of dentists tell me that those are the most difficult parts of managing a dental practice.  

I really need to work on my confidence in diagnosing dental disease and restorative dentistry. I think I can generally do procedures when I’m out on Ohio Project, but sometimes I second guess what I’m doing and feel the need to ask for a second opinion from whoever is attending. I really need to work on this because at some point I won’t always have someone to give a second opinion on and need to be more confident as an independent practitioner. 

To me, being a “professional” means personifying the archetype of what the expectations that the general public has for that profession or situation. For instance, when I work in a creative field I tend to dress louder and be more animated in my speech and action, because that is what the clients expect for you as a creative professional. However, conversely, several times a year I have to put on my Army uniform for training, the expectations of professional behavior are much different: I am much more reserved, quiet and serious, who speaks less and is less animated because that is what is expected.

The study of the creation of high performance interdisciplinary teams was central to my MBA in marketing and innovation management. The key in my experience to having an interdisciplinary group work well is to work together to set a large goal with a set of smaller goals that have escalating levels of difficulties, in addition it is important to know the expertise of each person in the group and give them an appropriate role. One of the reasons I became interested in dentistry is that it allows me to potentially be flexible in my role in a healthcare team. For instance, a patient who has complex medical needs, the dentist gets to be a specialist consultant for specific parts of the patient’s treatment plan. However, for a patient who has complex dental needs, the dentist gets to be the leader of the team, managing the overall care with specialists to achieve the larger goal.

The extracurricular activity that I think will most help my dental career is my occasional work with my occasional freelance graphic design practice. It keeps my business skills sharp with sales and money management, it also lets me work with a variety of people in industries and have conversations, and most importantly practice selling design work and getting acceptance of final products, which I think is very helpful for helping me portray dental care to patients and gaining case acceptance. 

I try to exhibit leadership by knowing what I am best at and finding opportunities to make a difference by leading in those areas. For instance, in the dental school clubs I belong to, I try to leverage my design skills for developing merch for fundraising. I also spearheaded the redesign of the clinic manual. After using the manual in the clinic D3 year, I realized that there were a lot of gaps that could be improved. Although I was not on the executive board of ASDA, I decided to take the initiative and showed the executive board some of my previous work and asked if I could lead a redesign effort. They said yes and I was able to work with several students to find the shortcomings of previous editions of the clinic manual and together we were able to deliver a more user-friendly clinic guide that many of the new D3s and some D4s seem to be using every day.

My key leadership experience is noticing problems and trying to garner support for solutions. In the professional world, this usually required me noticing a problem, showing why the problem is important and garnering diverse support to garner resources to find a solution. At the dental school, I was able to do this by redeveloping the ASDA clinic manual. After my first year in the clinic I noticed that the clinic manual hadn’t been updated in several years. I decided that while useful, the usability of the ASDA clinic manual could be improved, and the overall layout and design could be improved dramatically. After gathering stakeholders, the manual was able to come together in a short timeframe to pretty good acclaim from most of the users.