Celebrating the Class of 2021: Maham Tanveer

By Diane Peters

The DDS class of 2021 has the unique honour of graduating in the second most turbulent year in recent history. While spring 2020 saw dentistry offices closed as dental students were about to graduate, this year the slowly receding pandemic is still impacting dental education, the job market and the world. These resilient new grads have stayed positive and look forward to tackling the next chapter of their careers.

Completing a dental degree as a newcomer to Canada is hard enough. Add in a pandemic. Then have a baby.

That’s what Maham Tanveer 2T1 did and has come out the other side ready to start her career. 

Her son, Zaviar, is now an active 17 months old. “This guy loves food. He loves broccoli and blueberries. I didn’t know a baby could love broccoli that much,” says Tanveer. We spoke to her as she was taking some downtime after her exams. “I’m trying to take some time off and spend time with him. I ignored him so much over the last few months!”

Tanveer completed her dental degree in Pakistan in 2015 and then left her home country to join her family, who had come to Canada two years earlier. She comes from a family of doctors — her mother is a gynecologist who has put off her own re-qualification for now and is working as a physician’s assistant — but got inspired by dentistry when she saw the unmet need in Pakistan.

As soon as she got to Canada, Tanveer wrote as many qualification exams as she could, including those for the U.S. She landed one of 24 coveted spots in the University of Toronto’s International Dentist Advanced Placement Program (IDAPP) in 2019.

Tanveer appreciated polishing her clinical skills and learning the Canadian approach to record keeping, infection control and chairside manner. “The way you talk to patients here, the way you approach them, I learned a lot about that.”

Getting pregnant in her third year slowed her down, but only physically. “Anytime I’d drop something, I’d need help from colleagues to come and pick it up for me.”

Tanveer took six weeks off in early 2020 — she had been hoping to have a shorter leave but both her and then the baby had short-term health issues — and then returned to school, quickly catching up on her assignments. Back home in Brampton, Tanveer’s husband and mother took time off to care for Zaviar. The pandemic hitting then prevented the family from hiring a nanny, so everyone pitched in. 

Now, Tanveer is hoping for a position as an associate somewhere in the GTA. Once she’s established, she’d like to visit Pakistan to volunteer, as dental care there is prohibitively expensive, even for well-off families, and not considered a priority. “It’s always been in the back of my mind to go back and help those who have been unable to care for their mouths.”

Photo: Faculty of Dentistry banner (Jeff Comber)