Hannah Jaghab wanted to give back—and a weekend exploring Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (U.P.) during the summer didn’t sound bad, either.
“When I found out about Planet Smilez, I initially thought I’d be going up north to do cleanings,” Jaghab said. “But when I learned more about their program, I started getting excited about the mentorship aspect.”
Jaghab was one of the 16 second-year dental students from the University of Michigan School of Dentistry (UM) who volunteered their weekends to staff Planet Smilez’s Discovering Dentistry Symposium in Marquette, Michigan, at the Northern Center.
The symposium is a one-day, immersive experience designed to introduce high schoolers to oral health professions.
At each event, participating high schoolers experience a white coat ceremony that welcomes them into their roles as oral health professionals for the day. Then, they rotate among learning modules designed to give them a taste of the different roles they might be expected to perform in a dental office: addressing dental trauma, applying resin restorations, hygiene and prevention, and how oral health affects overall health.
| A high school student using a curing light on a mouth model. (Photo by Jen Anderson) |
The UM dental student volunteers taught each learning module.
“Both of my parents are dentists, so I was always interested in healthcare, and they always encouraged that interest,” Jaghab said. “When I asked the kids if they had any dentists in their family or even anyone they knew who was a dentist, every single one of them said no.”
Jaghab believes that it’s hard to know what it’s like to work in the profession if you haven’t been exposed to it, which makes events like these important—especially in dental shortage areas.
“They’re at such a young, impressionable age, and if you don’t have anybody in dentistry, how are you going to know if you like it?” she said.
Cultivating that interest is crucial.
Growing the U.P.’s oral health workforce
More than 1.9 million Michiganders live in areas where access to dental care is limited. In fact, 93% of the symposium participants were from a dental health professional shortage area.
In the U.P., there are fewer than 220 licensed dentists, and more than 32% of them are over the age of 55. This looming retirement cliff will create additional access challenges for the U.P., where patients already face long wait times or travel long distances to receive care.
It’s not just dentists. Around 3,000 dental hygienists have left the workforce in Michigan since 2020, and dental assistants are in short supply, especially in rural areas.
“I attended an oral health conference last year, and one of the things we talked about in breakouts was about how the U.P. is such an underserved area and how everyone is trying all these different things to get people to work there,” says John Scharf, another one of the second-year dental students who volunteered for the event. “People mentioned bonuses or financial aid or even starting a brand-new dental school, but programs like the kind Planet Smilez runs made the most sense to me.”
| John Scharf starts to demonstrate a technique using a mouth model. (Photo by Jen Anderson) |
Scharf notes that these types of career programs generate interest, show participants pathways to enter the profession and take fewer resources than many other initiatives. He also believes—and some research supports—that students who grow up in rural communities are much more likely to return to them to practice.
“It seems easier to train the people who already know and live in those communities rather than trying to incentivize outsiders to come in,” Scharf said. “During the event, there didn’t seem to be any indication that the students were like, oh, I’m going to be a dentist and move back to the city. Everyone was like, well, obviously I’m coming back to my community.”
The trip to the U.P. was also an opportunity for the dental students to learn more about what it might be like to practice in a rural community. Some of the dental students are in the process of starting a Rural Health Impact Club with the goal of showing their peers how big an impact they can really have in rural communities.
Both the high schoolers and the UM dental students walked away with greater insight.
Mentorship as a two-way street
The dental students from UM functioned as near-peer mentors—slightly older, more experienced peers—to the participating high schoolers and pre-dental college students. The idea is that, as people who are still going through dental school, the UM dental students can share their experiences and answer questions in a much more relatable way.
Plus, the event doesn’t “end” when everyone packs up and goes home. All participating students can continue their career exploration through a six-session virtual mentorship program with the Planet Smilez team: Dr. Kathryn Pawlak, founder, and Dr. Lauren Gritzer, community impact and evaluation director.
The virtual mentorship program helps participants understand the academic, professional and leadership skills necessary to pursue each career pathway, as well as guidance on developing their resumes and creating a dental shadowing plan.
| From left to right: Sydney Proudlock, Hannah Jaghab, Hannah VanderLugt and John Scharf. (Photo by Jen Anderson) |
Scharf notes that the event helped his own learning. In some ways, the symposium builds on the famous “see one, do one, teach one” model. The idea is that a student observes a skill first, tries the skill themselves and then explains how to do it to a new learner, cementing that knowledge in their own mind.
That morning, before the high schoolers arrived for the program, some of the UM dental students learned simple suturing for the first time. Then, they taught participants how to do it using mouth models.
“It made me a lot more efficient,” Scharf explained. “Having to demonstrate the suturing made me think, how do I just make this kid know exactly what I’m saying? So I came up with a way to explain how you turn your hands using shapes. Are you making a ‘J’ or an ‘L’? If it’s a ‘J,’ go for it. I know that when I’m doing sutures now, I’m going to be thinking about that advice.”
Scharf spent many years as a camp counselor, and he’s been active in scouting. As a result, he’s spent a lot of time interacting with young people and thinking about the best ways to get them interested and engaged.
“It’s about making sure that they like the information that’s presented to them and in a way that they’re going to want to do dentistry in the future because of it,” he said.
So far, pre- and post-event surveys suggest that the Discovering Dental Symposium is achieving measurable success.
According to the Planet Smilez survey, every hands-on module was rated as a positive experience by 80 percent of the respondents, with 90% of respondents expressing a desire to pursue a career in oral health following the program. The survey also demonstrated a statistically significant knowledge gain among participants, especially in terms of the link between oral and overall health. That’s insight the participants can take back to their friends and families, ideally improving their oral health by proxy.
“The program really made me think a lot about how far I’ve come and how much potential people can have, even if they’re not nailing a skill on the first try,” Scharf said. “Showing them one small thing could change everything.”
To learn more about Planet Smilez and the programs it runs, we recommend reading “Planet Smilez program gives students hands-on dental career experience.”