Welcome to our blog!
The ASDA chapter at Texas A&M College of Dentistry would like to introduce you to our new blog which we hope will allow you to glance into the life of a dental student. On this blog, we will allow dental students and pre-dent students to share anything from personal stories to updates on our day to day life. The blog will be updated 2 times every month. We hope you take a moment to keep up with what our ASDA chapter is up to.
For the upcoming year, we have made huge strides in restructuring the entire chapter and establishing a more stable legacy of leadership. We have restructured our officers and committee positions, published our new monthly ASDA newsletter “The Finish Line”, launched a new website for a cleaner design with blogging capabilities (visit our website at www.tamcdasda.wixsite.com/asda), created a TAMCOD ASDA mobile application (available on iOS and android!), and increased its presence on campus through new and improved events, outreach, and social media campaigns.
As part of the re-organization of officers, the chapter transitioned from a second year President-Elect to a second year Vice President and established the offices of the D1 representative and Pre-dental Liaison. The D1 representative position will be filled in September (we will send out information about this soon). This will allow for a leadership team which is inclusive of first years and thus of all four dental school classes as well as pre-dentals. Eight committees were created by allowing officers from the past year to work with the elected officer of their respective role. This not only allows for a smoother transition and better collaboration on ideas, but also expands the leadership team to more students. Of these committees, a pilot newsletter committee was created, which is working hard to spearhead a project from the ground up. The pre-dental committee is also able to better serve pre-dents through the new Pre-dent Liaison by establishing a direct line of communication with pre-dents in the DFW area and idea sharing to implement new events like the upcoming Pre-dent Open House in October.
Now more than ever, the convenience of communicating directly through students’ phones has benefitted us in various ways. With the implementation of the app, ASDA fever has spread, resulting in increased involvement in events. The “events check-in” feature will allow us to track membership activity and reward the most active member with a trip to Annual Session in February or the National Leadership Conference in November. The app has made it possible to clearly deliver information from both local and national ASDA and share useful information to our members such as our “ASDA Clinic Manual”, lab video tutorials, and upcoming events.
This year, our organization made efforts to bring back to life events from years past which have been forgotten, as well as breathed new life into the previous year’s events. TAMCOD ASDA’s fifth annual Brush Week was held the second week of school, garnering ASDA involvement and awareness from a class vs. class friendly competition. It has now become an event the entire school looks forward to. We replaced the Wednesday lunch & learn event with Mock Congress to introduce the importance of legislation to our members earlier than ever before. Our advocacy efforts have greatly improved with the addition of new events like Mock Congress, ADPAC drive in the summer, Advocacy Academy in November and the Engage competition in October. We have introduced brand new events all across the board, from our community outreach at Ronald McDonald house to our wellness event at Soul Cycle. We even improved our social media presence through efforts like our “tooth jar” competition.
Thank you for taking your time to read our blog. I am so proud of our chapter for what we have accomplished and cannot wait to see what else is in store this upcoming year. If you would like to be an author on our blog, please email Annie Shedlosky at shedlosky@tamhsc.edu.
Sincerely,
Lana Khazma
TAMCOD ASDA President ’18-‘19