We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dr. Armen Akopian a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Dr. Armen , thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
My parents emigrated to the United States with very little money in their pocket, no family or connections to anyone here and with a 3 year old kid – me. When we first arrived we were living in a one bedroom apartment in Queens, NY. My father started a job at NYU Langone doing research in the department of neuroscience and my mother got a job as a radiology technician. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to move to a new country where you don’t know anyone and start your life over and they were basically the age I am now when they did it. The amount of courage and belief in themselves that they were doing this to provide a better life for their kid is something that motivates me to this day. Both of my parents worked long hours during the week and my mom even worked on weekends to make ends meet. Their commutes were rough too, traveling almost 3 hours a day between the bus, subway and walking to work. Anytime I have a negative thought or think I can’t or don’t want to do something I think about the sacrifices they made and it motivates me to work harder and not give up.
I shared a room with my little sister until I was about 14 when my parents achieved their dream and bought a house in the suburbs of Long Island. They wanted to give us a backyard, a nicer school to attend, and our own rooms but in order to afford this they had to work even harder. My dad’s commute got longer and my mom had to find a new job. Not only was she able to find one but through hard work she became the director of a major imagining center. Even though she was working long hours she would still find a way to always make us homemade meals and help us with our homework.
I owe my work ethic to my parents and the example they set. Seeing what they went through, the odds they were able to overcome and success they were able achieve is something that is instilled in me from a young age.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
When people ask me what I do, my go to answer is I am a restorative and cosmetic dentist. Inevitably when the conversation continues they begin to understand that my love for dentistry is not about the teeth. Let me explain by telling you my story. When I got into dental school at New York University I spent my time exploring every specialty. The dental school load is heavy as you can imagine and there isn’t a lot of free time but whatever free time I could muster I would go into the post graduate specialty clinics and shadow the residents. I spent time in almost all the departments including oral surgery, prosthodontics, and even pediatrics but it wasn’t until I discovered the aesthetics department that I fell in love. The way they were able to make a huge impact on each patient’s life by simply improving the appearance of their smile was incredibly appealing to me. Every single person I witnessed that got a smile makeover was happier, more confident and even said they approached life with a new found sense of empowerment. I knew this was what I wanted to do so I got to work on applying for the honors aesthetics program for my senior year. This program was incredibly difficult to get into and only a handful of our class of over 400 people got selected to be in it. The icing on the cake, the director was the inventor of the porcelain veneer, Dr. John Calamia. After I was accepted into the program he became one of my first mentors and I tried to extract (no pun intended) everything I could from this man who is a legend in the dental community. I am incredibly grateful for this experience and Dr. Calamia because I started to learn how to treatment plan and do complex cosmetic cases at a time when most of my peers were learning to do fillings. He even took us to the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry meeting and I remember being fascinated by all the incredible speakers and talented clinicians from across the world. I dreamed to be a top dentist like them and after graduating my thirst for more knowledge was unquenchable. I asked these top dentists I had met what was the best continuing education program that would make me a better dentist and they referred me to Dr. Frank Spear. While still working my regular 9-5 as a general dentist, I invested the next four years of my free time and thousands of more dollars learning everything I could from the master clinicians in the program. After taking one of the modules in that program about restoring the terminal dentition (patients that were missing all their teeth) I started to get interested in dental implants. So, I made another large investment in time and money to learn implants from the best in the world at the NYU Continuing Education Implant program. After doing that for a year I wanted more so I did a deep dive and took all the courses I could on dental implants, from placing them, to restoring them, to dealing with complications.
I now had restorative dentistry, cosmetic dentistry, and implants in my tool belt and could help a wide variety of patients that had any or all of these issues. Around that time, I reconnected with another world class dentist and lecturer, Dr. Dean Vafiadis, whose specialty is full mouth reconstructions, which is a procedure patients require if their bite is collapsed due to age, grinding their teeth or years of botched dentistry. I emailed Dr. Dean and asked if I could come shadow him on my day off. He allowed me to come to his high-end cosmetic practice on Fifth avenue and was so gracious with his time and knowledge. I learned so much that day that I asked him if I could come back the following week. He allowed me to and I kept going back for about 6 months. Now mind you I was 5 years out of dental school with a huge amount of debt at this time not only from school but also all the continuing education I had done and I definitely could’ve been working that day to make money but I thought if I want to do what this guy does, I better invest my time and learn from him because he is one of the best in the world and is actually willing to teach me. After the 6 months he offered me a job and I was beyond ecstatic and grateful to be working at one of the top dental offices in the country where I could put all my experiences from the cosmetics at NYU, the Spear education, the implant training, and the full mouth reconstruction concepts together to provide a high level of care for my patients.
I currently see all types of dental patients from routine general dentistry, to implants, to smile makeovers and full mouth reconstructions and I am faculty at the Full Mouth Reconstruction program where we teach fellow dentists our techniques. I am grateful for all my mentors who helped develop me into the clinician I am today. I can honestly say the training I underwent allows me to take care of my patients in a way that I feel proud of and makes an impact on their lives which is really why I do what I do. As a wise dentist once said, it’s not about the teeth, it’s about what the teeth can give the person the power to do.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The top three qualities that have been most impactful in my journey are:
-Passion. I was a big Kobe Bryant fan growing up because his work ethic was always inspiring to me and he spoke of the idea that if you truly love what you do you need to be a student of the game. I am forever a student of my profession and love learning every little nuance about it so I can better serve my patients.
-Humility. This ties in to the first quality, because as a student of the game you know that there is always more to learn. If you let yourself be prideful and think you know it all that’s when you will start to decline.
-Striving for Excellence- Another Kobe quote “If you want to play at an excellent level you need to be excellent all the time. It’s a way of life. You have to be excellent across the board and that’s how you build habits. When excellence becomes a habit then that’s just who you are.” It also ties in with another one of my favorite quotes, which is “The way you do anything is the way you do everything.” That is to say each step of a procedure, whether its an implant, a smile makeover or even a filling should be done at an excellent or mastery level to ensure the end result of that procedure is going to be an excellent result.
My advice for people early in their journey, no matter what that journey is, is make sure you love what you do, go all in and be ready to persist. There will be setbacks and things that don’t go your way along your journey but if you love what you do and you find purpose in it and know your why you will be able to persevere.
Tell us what your ideal client would be like?
The beauty of my profession is everyone has teeth and so everyone is an ideal potential patient/client. I’m being facetious but I’d like to flip the question. There are a lot of dentists and dental offices out there so what makes me an ideal dentist for you. I believe you should come see me if you value high quality dentistry, done in a comfortable and relaxing setting, with a team of people who are trained at not only the highest level of the profession but of customer service and hospitality. From the first phone call to the moment you walk into the office, you will notice it’s not your typical dental experience. The staff know who you are and are super friendly. You are treated like a person and not a set of teeth. It doesn’t feel, smell or sound like your regular dental office which is great because that relieves a lot of the anxiety patients have when going to the dentist. There is no waiting for the doctor. If your appointment is at 10:30am you are seated at 10:30am. There are TVs, headphones and blankets for your comfort during your appointment. If you care about using top quality materials, labs, and the latest technology for your dental work then rest assured that is what you are getting. And if you care about being taken care of by a dentist that is involved in education and teaches other dentists than you’ve found the ideal office for you.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.doctorarmen.com
- Instagram: @doctor.armen
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/doctor.armen
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/armen-akopian-b09b774a/
