Column: Dr. Andrew Miller

Becoming an educator was one of the easiest decisions that I have ever made; and it can be for you as well. Like almost every admissions letter I had the opportunity to review while serving on the Admissions Committee at Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine during my tenure as Director of Predoctoral Endodontics, I also entered the dental profession with a heart for service and giving back.

It is easy to enter the race of survival mode in dental school, then set our eyes on our favorite specialty that we believe would provide the best balance of lifestyle, financial reward, and serving others, followed by the rat race of private practice and personal life. Once we get into our habits of daily life and routine, it can be particularly challenging to stop for a moment and remember why we did this in the first place. Reminding ourselves that part of our personal and professional develop is not simply keeping up with the minimum CE requirements, or deep-diving into the most advanced microsurgical course, or pushing ourselves to increase how many cases we pack per day; but instead, how we can share our experience, knowledge, and skills with the next generation of dental professionals just like so many of our favorite and perhaps not so favorite faculty did for us.

During my final year of Endodontic Residency, I was asked by my Department Chair to stay on as a part-time faculty in the Advanced Education in Endodontic Program at Boston University. My first reaction was to tell myself that I am not a teacher, I don’t have enough experience, and someone else would do a much better job than me. Sometimes I forget that tutoring underclassmen in elementary, middle school, and high school in math as well as volunteering as a Sunday School helper at Church were a significant part of who I am and who I have become. Although I do not have formal training as an “Educator” at the University or College level, I have come to find that I am in fact an Educator at heart. With that in mind, I happily accepted this new challenge and it led me on a long journey of becoming the Director of Predoctoral Endodontics at Boston University for 8 years and being awarded the Spencer N. Frankl Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2023.

I was able to teach full-time while also working in private practice 2.5 days per week so I could continue to balance my academic career and my patient treatment skills. This combination allowed me to be a both a better educator as well as a stronger clinician as I was constantly in a position of explaining procedures, techniques, and concepts to students while using an evidence based approach, and being in the middle of an academic environment allowed me to stay up-to-date on the most advanced information emerging in the field of endodontics to apply to my clinical practice. Being a Diplomate of the ABE, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Dentists of Canada, I was also able to mentor Endodontic Residents pursuing board certification in both Canada and the United States.

A few individuals asked me along the way if I would like to “move up” from Predoctoral education and work with the Postdoctoral department. I believe there can be some misunderstanding or stigma attached with the differentiation between teaching DMD Students versus Endodontic Residents, and I want to share that both are equally important and have their unique characteristics that allow potential educators to see what might be the best fit for them. As I was once told, “you only need to know a little more than the person you are teaching” and this is what helped get over my fear of not knowing enough and launched my academic career.

Predoctoral programs tend to have significantly larger class sizes than Postdoctoral residencies, and the students enrolled have quite a varied background, but what they have in common is that none of them have performed any endodontic therapy yet. It is one of the greatest opportunities to impact lives and one aspect that kept me dedicated and motivated to continue in that environment is that even if only a few of the students become better because of something I taught or shared, it will impact every single patient that they encounter throughout their career; whereas if I only work in private practice then my impact is still strong but limited to one patient at a time. We had the opportunity to create a strong foundation of endodontic skills and knowledge, fostering a positive environment and opportunity for those students inspired to seek additional information and experience as desired. It can be very challenging mentally and emotionally to review the same procedure and steps over and over because every day is literally someone’s first time performing an endodontic procedure in the Predoctoral Endodontic Clinic, but, if overseen correctly, it can establish healthy habits on difficulty assessment, case selection, and proper referral protocols for clinicians that last an entire career to serve General Dentists, Endodontists, and the patients we all serve.

Postdoctoral education allows for more refined honing and tuning of pre-existing knowledge, experience, and skills after a pre-selection process which screens for the best and brightest. One of the biggest challenges can be convincing the “most experienced” residents to slow down and change their approach to diagnosis, case selection, treatment options, anesthesia, isolation, access, working length establishment, cleaning & shaping and disinfection protocols, obturation techniques and materials, restoration, surgical techniques, etc. One of the most rewarding aspects are seeing your resident get pinned at the annual AAE meeting after achieving ABE Diplomate status, running into them and finding out that they are doing well in private practice, and seeing them involved in Academia and Organized Dentistry.

As I mentioned earlier, we all went into this field with a heart for service. If you haven’t already, consider reaching out to your local Dental School and/or alma mater to see how you can give back, then I encourage you to do so. Sometimes it can be a single virtual or in-person lunch and learn Q&A with interested Predoctoral Students or Postdoctoral Residents wondering what life is like as a Private Practice Endodontist, volunteering in the Patient Treatment Center with direct patient care, or sitting in on literature review classes to hone your own evidence based skills or help provide a clinical connection between benchtop and patient-facing aspects of our vast endodontic literature. Once you start, you never know what opportunities will arise and where it will take you. We all have opinions on what could have been better during our training programs but what did we do about it once we graduated? I like to say – “be the change you wish you’d had!”