Gateway to a Career: Allison Striano

Allison Striano

In first grade, Allison Striano was enthralled when a classmate’s dentist dad visited on career day. “I really loved it,” she remembers. “He brought some kits in that we could take home, and I took two.”

But her childhood interest in dentistry remained vague until she enrolled in RSDM’s Gateway to Dentistry program as a sophomore biology major at the Rutgers–New Brunswick campus.

The Gateway program allows students with an interest in dentistry to spend two weeks at RSDM, immersed in interactive lessons about clinical techniques, dental specialties, and oral health research. It helped Striano, now 25, decide that dentistry was the career choice for her. “There’s no other opportunity to do that kind of hands-on work in this field,” she says. “That was really valuable for me—being able to know this is what I wanted to do.”

Striano also learned how rewarding the profession can be. “You can touch people. You can see the physical difference in something you do to help them, and the patient can appreciate it, too.”

Striano, of the Class of 2015, enrolled at RSDM in part because she knew it would offer a supportive atmosphere to offset the demands of dental school. “The staff and faculty are very warm and welcoming,” she said. “Not every school I went to is like that. Dental school is a tough two years, so to have an atmosphere like that makes a huge difference.”