ASDA’S 41ST ANNUAL SESSION REPORT

It was a huge honnor for me to represent EDSA during the 41st Annual Session of the American Student Dental Association (ASDA), which was held in Los Angeles from March 2 to March 6.

First, let me present you the structure of this association. ASDA represent more than 17,000 students in USA. In order to have a usefull and workfull organization, the students are grouped in 58 Chapters (one for each dental school), which are grouped in 11 Districts (directed by Trustees), themselves grouped in 6 Caucus.

The Association is directed by the President and two Vice Presidents elected by the House of Delegates. Each Chapter is represented there by two students. They have an administrative office in Chicago, formed by 11 people full-time devoted to ASDA, directed by an Executive Director.

Every year, they organize three regional meeting (West, Middle, East) and one Annual Session.

The Annual Session is the most important event of the year for ASDA. It is a very serious and formal event. Everybody wears business attire, and there are no parties organized except the last night.

The representatives are highly motivated and during the event prizes are being distributed, but the appreciated one is « the Most Ideal Chapter overall ».

They created a mobile application only for the Session, and every day a printed newsletter was distributed, talking about the most important moments of the previous day!

During the Session was held the election of the new Executive Committee for 2011-2012: the new ASDA President is Adam Shisler (Houston, TX), and the two new Vice Presidents are Ken Randall (Lexington, KY) and Brittany Bensch (Seattle, WA).

It was a very constructive Session and there are many things that can inspire us, like a Code of Ethics which is abide by all the ASDA members, or their Strategic plan in 6 goals for 2011-2013.

I was given the opportunity to introduce EDSA in front of the House of

the Delegates, having a short presentation about our association. I met many people interested by our new Research program: individual students and associations like the National Student Research Group, the American Dental Student Association or the Student National Association. We are working with them to develop this new EDSA project and make a huge success of it!

During a formal meeting, I met the leaders of the most important students organizations in America and in the World. Were present : Corwyn Hopke, ASDA’s President ; Andrew Read-Fuller and Naomi Sever, ASDA’s Vice Presidents ; Nancy Honeycutt, ASDA’s Executive Director ; Kaitrin Baloue, President-elect of National Student Research Camp ; Ricardo Lugo, Student Trustee from the Hispanic Dental Association ; Diana Lyu from the American Dental Education Association ; Ngozi Okoh, President-elect of Student National Association ; and Ionut Luchian, President of the International Association of Dental Students.

During this meeting we agreed that it is difficult to start a fruitful collaboration cause we are all changing our Boards every year, and time is going too fast to keep a straight direction in our projects. That's the reason why we agreed to be supported by the staff of ASDA, which is not changing every year. They will keep an updated list of contacts of the current representatives of the associations and organize video calls several times a year. Everybody will be updated and we could drive many projects together. We found three common directions that we can follow up together: improvement of leadership, international exchanges and communication between international leaders. It's only a first step, but it is the beginning of a fruitful cooperation!

Finally, I would like to inform you that the ASDA’S 42nd Annual Session will be held in Minneapolis February 29 - March 4 2012.

It was definitely a constructive Session and it was a great pleasure for me to attend it. I am looking forward to continue all the work that has been started there.

Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to represent EDSA !

Matthieu Wipf EDSA Vice-President