“When I was getting out of active duty in the Air Force, I worked as an associate dentist in a couple of practices. I started my own dental practice in 2014 and loved doing that.

In 2020, I developed cervical dystonia, which made keeping my head down and still for eight hours a day difficult. So, I had the opportunity to move over into education, which has been fantastic.

We have an amazing, just a tremendous, dental education program here.

I’m very proud to be a part of it and watching them progress from new dental providers where they’re kind of terrified to be working on live patients to when they come up to graduation and feel very competent and confident, and they’re really kind of sick of taking advice at that point.

And I actually love that arc. I love seeing them get to the point where they’re like, ‘I’m good. I can do this on my own.’

That’s the most gratifying part of my job: seeing that progress in the students.

In addition to my role as clinic director for the main clinic here at Wakara Way for the pre-doctoral program, I’m the president-elect of the Academic Senate.

My senate involvement came around because I was relatively new to academia, and I saw it as an opportunity to help, but also as an opportunity for me to really get to understand how academia ran.

It’s so different than private practice. It’s so different than the military. It’s an opportunity for me to learn and to meet people who are so brilliant and successful in academia, to be around them and to pitch in where I could actually make things better.

There’s always—no matter what kind of organization you’re in, whether you own a small business or you’re in a bureaucracy like the military or here in academia—lots of things that need to get done that don’t fall within any person’s specific job description. So, if you want to just improve things and help the organization run in a more efficient way, then I’ve always been somebody who has been willing to just put my hand up and say, ‘Yeah, I’ll help do that.’

We are at just a wildly interesting—not always in a good way—and busy time. What we’re faced with right now is a lot of updates and changes to university policy, clarifying how things operate so that we stay in compliance with state law and we meet the expectations of the Board of Trustees as well as the legislature.

It’s a very unique time in our history for higher education, I think.

I’m grateful for being at a university that has a very active Academic Senate and a lot of people willing to pitch in to continue to make it better.”

—Brent Milne, director of the Wakara Clinic, University of Utah School of Dentistry and president-elect of the Academic Senate