The national ADEA chapter is growing fast. With the help of established chapters, like UCSF in the Council of Students, Residents, and Fellows, ADEA local chapters have been coming to fruition across multiple dental schools. Forty-eight of the sixty-six US dental schools to be exact. How has this process been stream-lined? By coming together and combining all the successful tips and tricks from all the local chapters into a handy document called a ADEA Chapter Toolkit for Students, Residents and Fellows. This page on the ADEA website is a result of ideations at the Fall and Annual Meetings. The benefit of this website has been priceless as its helped many of the new chapters get a strong foundation, and helped older chapters get new ideas to help promote dental education and ADEA as a whole. UCSF’s local student chapter is one of the longest standing chapters in ADEA. Our contribution into the toolkit has been ample ideas of events that have had successful outcomes and helped our students understand what dental academia looks like and can provide.
What does UCSF plan on doing with this toolkit? We hope to continue to build on it from our local chapter, extrapolate ideas from it, and collaborate more with other local schools to help build camaraderie! With Loma Linda University starting their new chapter, UCLA going into their third year of their chapter, and UOP looking for ways to get more students involved, UCSF has been able to help by being in close proximity and on the same time zone! As of now, one of our mini goals within the local chapter is combining events with our cross town school to give our students a mix of academic taste in the private school and public school setting. We foresee this being a benefit to our students as many of them always have questions about private school and public school environments!
Our local chapter will continue to host events for our students that have had continuous positive feedback in the past. We are also putting all hands on deck in supporting Western University as they are hosting the next West Coast Dental Hack-a-thon that was started by one of our very own here last year at UCSF. This year, we anticipate having a equal number of students from all district 11 schools to attend as well as students from schools in district 9. Our chapter growth and new ideas could not have been possible if we didn’t have our enthusiastic ADEA members attend meetings like Fall and Annual. Our eager students continue to be excited about what’s to come for ADEA and dental academia. What better way to learn and hear about it than from the creators and the backbone of dental education themselves?