I think early on, I knew I wanted to be a health professional, either a dentist or a physician. And as it just happened, one of the first professionals I got to meet on a personal level was a dentist. And I met him when I was in undergraduate school at North Carolina Central University, and he took me to his office. He showed me basically what a dentist does, how dentistry is practice, and I was really impressed, impressed enough that I applied to dental school, you know, not long after we met. And once I got there, I found out I really had a lot of natural instinctual abilities, and so I just knew I was in the right place.
The most rewarding part for me, personally is the ability to sort of make something out of nothing. Your patient comes in and they have a problem, their perspective on it is very broad. “I’m hurting. I can’t eat like I wanna eat, I don’t look like I wanna look.” And I look at all of those things and it’s part of diagnosis and treatment plan in any medical or health situation. And out of what they tell me and what I see, I get an image of what needs to happen to fulfill all of those qualities and desires that the patient is looking for. And to do that, to take all that chaos and then organize it into something that’s beautiful and functional is very satisfying to me.