Back as Clinical Faculty
Allison Sceppaguercio ’15 (right) with her classmates on graduation day.
Doctors often need to educate their patients. But Allison Sceppaguercio ’15 discovered a knack for teaching while tutoring underclassmen. She enjoyed it so much so that she enrolled in Rutgers School of Dental Medicine’s (RSDM) From Practice to Preceptor program, which trained dental professionals to work with students in the classroom and clinic.
“The clinical teaching experience portion of it was really great,” said Sceppaguercio, who now employs those learnings as a clinical instructor at RSDM. “I had a little bit of a dry run that was definitely helpful in transitioning.”
Since September, she has been spending a day in the clinic with predoctoral students. For the rest, she practices at Clark Family Dental Associates. “It works out really nicely,” she said. “It just is really interesting … to try and contribute something to the student experience.”
Sceppaguercio is the first dentist in her family. She’s been exposed to health care through her nurse mother and to working with hands through her technician father. But the idea of becoming a dentist came from her orthodontist. “We spent a long time together [in treatment], and he said, ‘you should do this,’” Sceppaguercio recalled.
Sceppaguercio (right) with vice dean Kim Fenesy (left) and friend classmate Serah Uddaraju (center).
She began to test out the idea.
She shadowed dentists and volunteered at a dental clinic. “I surrounded myself with dentistry to see if I liked it and what it was all about,” she said. She attended RSDM’s pathway programs as a high schooler and also during college before enrolling in the DMD program. “It felt already familiar and comfortable as an environment once I came in,” she said. “And then we just happened to have a very cohesive class.”
On the clinic floor now, she often thinks back to those days, shaping how she is as an instructor. “There are black-and-white dentistry things that they need to learn,” she said. “But it's a matter of trying to help mold them and guide them so that they can feel confident in what they're doing and start to build their own little persona of how they're going to be as a clinician.”
Sceppaguercio with clinical assistant professor Anthony Chin.
And teaching is a mutually beneficial process.
“Dentistry can be very isolating because most people work independently,” she said. At RSDM, she finds the opportunity to engage with students, who make her think about dentistry differently with their fresh eyes and questions. Conversations with faculty help her keep a pulse on what's new in dentistry. “It's good to be talking critically about dentistry with others.”
She hopes other alumni will consider doing the same and join her efforts.
“If people remember themselves in the shoes of current students, they'd be so much more inclined to want to come back,” she said. “There's so much we can give them.”
