Dr. Brandice Allen is a pediatric dentist from Atlanta, Georgia. She trained at Howard University, Saint Louis University, and the University of Tennessee, where she also completed her pediatric dental residency. She serves as Dental Director for Hope Mission 360. In this Q&A, she talks about what success means to her, on and off the job.
How do you personally define success?
For me, success is not one big finish line. It is a string of small wins that add up over time. Some days it looks like a child who was scared of the dentist walking out smiling. Other days it looks like getting through a stack of paperwork so my team can start fresh in the morning. I try not to save the word “success” for the big milestones. If I only counted those, I would miss most of what actually makes up a good career.
Did your idea of success change as you moved through school?
It did. Going through Howard, then Saint Louis University, then dental school and residency in Tennessee, I spent years measuring success by grades and test scores. That makes sense when you are a student. But once I started treating real kids, the scorecard changed. A perfect exam score does not tell you if you can calm down a four-year-old who is mid-meltdown in the chair. I had to learn a whole different kind of competence that no transcript captures.
What does success look like in a normal work day?
Honestly, it looks like calm. If I can get through a day of appointments where every kid leaves less afraid of the dentist than when they walked in, that is a good day. Pediatric dentistry has a strange scoreboard. You are not just checking teeth, you are managing trust with someone who is small, nervous, and does not care about your credentials. Success is when a parent tells me their child asked when they get to come back.
How does your volunteer work fit into how you think about success?
My role as Dental Director for Hope Mission 360 has stretched my definition of success past my own patient chair. When you are working within a mission, success is not really about you at all. It is about how many people you reached, how much care you were able to organize, and whether the systems you built hold up when you are not standing right there. That kind of success is quieter. Nobody claps for a good supply checklist. But it is the thing that decides whether care actually reaches people.
Has there been a moment where you had to redefine what success meant?
Yes, moving from being a student to being a director. As a student, success was individual. You studied, you tested, you passed. Stepping into a director role for a mission means success gets measured by the group, not just by you. I had to get comfortable with the idea that my personal effort mattered less than whether the whole operation worked. That took some adjusting. I like being hands-on, and directing means trusting other hands too.
Do you think success looks different for a pediatric dentist than for other dentists?
I think it does, mostly because of the audience. Adult patients can usually tell you what is wrong and sit still while you fix it. Kids cannot always do either. So part of my success metric is about communication skill, not just clinical skill. Did I explain this in a way a six-year-old could follow? Did I make the parent feel like part of the plan instead of a bystander? Those are strange things to grade yourself on, but they matter as much as the technical work.
What role do things outside of work play in how you think about success?
A bigger role than people might expect. I travel, I bike, I go to live music and plays, and I make time for family. None of that shows up on a resume, but all of it keeps me steady enough to do the work well. I do not think you can measure professional success honestly while ignoring whether the rest of your life is holding together. For me, a successful year includes trips taken, rides finished, and time spent with people I care about, right alongside the professional wins.
If you had to give one piece of advice about success to someone starting out, what would it be?
Do not wait for one big moment to tell you that you made it. Look for it in the smaller stuff, the calm patient, the organized shift, the volunteer project that ran without a hitch. Those are the real markers. The big titles come and go. The daily habits are what actually build something worth having.