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Club links undergrads to dental school
Martin Smallidge, president of the Pre-Dental Association, will attend the University of Pittsburgh Dental School in the fall. Photo: MARK MULVILLE
The day before Give Kids a Smile Day, UB undergraduate Martin Smallidge is unpacking boxes of toothbrushes for the hundreds of giveaway packages he and fellow volunteers are putting together in a small conference room piled high with supplies in the Department of Community and Pediatric Dentistry.
He’d inked more than 225 nametags the night before for GKAS volunteers—community practitioners, dental hygienists, assistants and others—who’d be arriving the next morning just ahead of the children.
In the next room, Michelle Lee, also a UB undergraduate, makes copies of chair assignments for the next day. The office suite has the intensity of a war room, with staff and faculty hurrying to complete every final detail. The undergraduates are foot soldiers.
Or, more accurately, cadets. Smallidge and Lee are members of the UB Pre-Dental Association—president and vice president, respectively. These future dental students and their fellow association members are a valuable source of volunteer help with the hundreds of small jobs that must be done beforehand to make Give Kids a Smile Day run smoothly.
The pre-dental club is relatively new, founded by students only five years ago. Rina Patel, its first (and three-term) president, steered the group through the requirements to an official UB Student Association charter. Kimberly Cuddy, last year’s president, is now a first-year student in the UB School of Dental Medicine.
Smallidge will be starting at the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine next fall. And Lee, a sophomore, already has been accepted into the UB dental school, directly from high school, through the combined undergraduate-DDS degree program.
What brought them together was their shared ambition to go to dental school.
Before the Pre-Dental Association was formed, UB undergraduates who intended to go to dental school might find each other by happenstance, maybe in a biology class or at one of Kaplan’s DAT prep courses.
Now, they’re just a listserv away from each other. Smallidge has 180 e-mail addresses of UB undergraduates who intend to go to dental school; he and fellow association members go to UB new-student orientation to talk about the group. He says there are about 25-30 members who are regulars at association events.
To become a SA-sanctioned student organization, the pre-dental group had to demonstrate commitment by, among other things, volunteering in the community. Members signed on for UB-organized house painting and neighborhood cleanups. Once they’d proven themselves, they realized they really should be volunteering at the dental school. Their involvement with Give Kids a Smile Day has been growing ever since.
The club holds occasional social events—bowling, rock climbing—and more regular coffee “meet ups” and fundraisers, but the main activities involve its reason for being—learning more about the profession of dentistry, about what dental school is like and, of course, how to get admitted.
“I’d say it’s really a disadvantage not to get involved in the association,” Cuddy says. As a dental student (school is “difficult, but you get used to it”), she keeps up with the members of the pre-dental group by e-mail, mostly answering questions about the dental school interview—what to expect, what to do.
Cuddy says that when she was an undergraduate, she met a number of dental students who were happy to come to meetings to answer questions. In addition to dental students, the association recently heard presentations by Greg Hudecki, DDS ’72, the Buffalo Bills team dentist; an Army recruiter who discussed the option of combining dental school with a military commitment; and a representative of the Kaplan Dental Admissions Test (DAT) prep course.
Smallidge made his first appearance at Give Kids a Smile Day as a sophomore, responding to an e-mail call for volunteers. He spent the day in the Teddy Bear Clinic dressed as Superman. Last year, the association executive board decided the group could be more involved with the school and pushed to get out more volunteers. He was a frequent volunteer with the UB Smile Team this past summer as it spread the word about oral health care (and he handed out toothbrushes and dental floss) at health fairs.
Smallidge came to UB from Boonville, N.Y., to study to be a dentist. Although he will go to dental school in Pittsburgh—he was also accepted at UB, but says trying out a new city was a big appeal—UB gave him exactly what he came for: access to dental school, even if only as an observer, volunteer and student researcher.
Lee’s father, Ivan Lee, DDS ’84, practices in Manhattan; she started watching and then assisting him at 14 and a year later was observing oral surgeries without blinking. A Stuyvesant High School graduate, she came to UB guaranteed a place in the dental school as long as she maintains an impeccable academic record, passes the DAT and logs a sufficient number of hours of clinical observation. She assisted residents in the Advanced Education in General Dentistry (AEGD) clinic for three to four hours a week during her freshman year.
Classmate Lauren Meyers plans to apply for early assurance admission this spring. She says a main benefit of the association is the support and help members give each other with all the detail that goes into the countdown to a dental application process.
At the other end of the journey to dental school, Smallidge, who has seen almost every aspect of dental school—from oral biology bench science, to clinical dentistry, to community outreach—wants some of all of it. His ideal now is to be a practitioner and a scientist and an academic. And he’s thinking about adding public health to his program in Pittsburgh.
It’s a long way from volunteering to be Superman for a day. Or is it?
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