Teaching: A Way to Give Back

In the late 1990s, Nina O’Connell sat in Bay F in the preclinic, learning the craft of dentistry. Today, she’s back in those bays—this time on the other side, guiding students through the same formative experience.

“I've always loved teaching,” she said. Before dental school, O’Connell earned a bachelor’s degree in health education and taught briefly in Italy. But after graduating, she entered private practice and put teaching on the back burner. It wasn’t until the pandemic forced a reflective pause that she began to reconsider. “I was starting to think about what made me happy and teaching just immediately started to come to the top,” she said. “I wanted to give back.” 

Looking for a way to reconnect with that part of herself, O’Connell reached out to her alma mater. She began teaching dental anatomy in the preclinic for half a day, and the experience clicked right away.

“I immediately gravitated to the students,” she said. “I just really really enjoyed it.”

So that half-day quickly turned into a full day, then two and a half. Now, O’Connell teaches four days a week as an instructor in the Department of Restorative Dentistry. In August 2025, she officially retired from private practice and fully committed to teaching dentistry. She works in both the preclinic and clinic and also serves as a course director.

Along the way, faculty have helped her acclimate and grow as an educator. “Faculty are very willing to teach me how to be the best teacher that I can be and also allow me to express my creativity and my ideas in terms of how to teach,” she said. 

Returning as faculty also gave O’Connell a renewed understanding of how much dentistry has grown since her student days. When she was in school, nearly everything was analog. “We had to use regular mountings and put them on a view screen,” she recalled. Digital dentistry wasn’t yet part of the curriculum, and restorative materials were limited. Implants were similarly rare, too. Her class was also among the first to wear scrubs in the clinic.

Despite those changes, the students’ enthusiasm remains the most familiar part of being at the school. “I sort of feed off of students’ thirst to learn, and it fuels my desire to teach,” she said. “I was pleasantly surprised that I would feel that strongly. I look forward to getting up every day and popping out of bed in the morning, and I'm like, oh, time to go back to school. I just have this energy that I just can't quite explain. I just really think I found my place.”