All because of what she saw when she looked in the mirror as a little girl, Kinberly Antrim grew up shy and introverted.
“I had horrible teeth,” she said of her badly misaligned denture. “I wouldn’t even smile or talk to anyone or look them in the face; I was very self-conscious.”
Today, her smile is like sunshine—and does she ever chat, up close and personal, too. She has to; she’s a dentist—and brand new to solo practice.
That she had the confidence to strike out on her own in Gilroy, and in a traditionally male profession, was due largely to growing up in the city and great role models, from parents to her childhood dentists to colleagues.
“I’ve been more excited by it than daunted,” she said recently in her bright, airy offices in suite A-113 at the Gilroy Medical Park off Wren Avenue.
Her office underwent nearly $500,000 in remodeling and equipping before she moved in about three months ago and hung her own, single shingle: Kinberly Antrim, DDS.
Her staff includes hygienist Leslie Bozzo, treatment coordinator Sobrina Hernandez, and dental assistants Crystal Patino and Sylvia Medina.
What she calls her great team complements her own strengths, she said, starting with solid roots in the town.
“I have been practicing here for some time and I know a lot of people. It is a unique situation for a startup and I feel really good about starting from scratch,” said Antrim, 34.
As a bonus, “Dr. Gary Banner was my dentist as a kid and he was very motivating, so it’s kind of funny because I ended up (practicing) right next door to him,” she said.
“I really admired his positive, happy attitude and he was genuinely excited about my interest in dentistry.”
Banner encouraged her career path and “always offered his thoughts and advice about dentistry,” she said.
When time came to find a place of her own, doctors and others at the medical complex helped, including Dr. Abbas Raissi, Pete Collom, MFT, and Luanne Giaccalone, the property manager.
All “Went out of their way to make space available for me in the complex. I couldn’t feel more welcome and honored to be able to practice right next door to the dentist who told me to go for it,” she said.
As for being a woman in dentistry, she recently was asked to write an article for the Santa Clara County Dental Society about obstacles females face in the profession.
“I had a hard time writing it so I asked if I could write (instead) about whether dentistry is a great career for women. I wanted to change it to be a little more positive,” to reflect her own experiences, she said.
In her article, Antrim notes the number of female dentists in the country has risen in 15 years from 16 percent to nearly 30 percent of practitioners, or 57,589 according to the Kaiser Family Foundation–and she predicted it soon be more like half.
That’s because in the past 50 years the number of women in dental schools has climbed from about 1 percent to nearly 50 percent, according to the American Association of Women Dentists.
“Our profession, and society, has come a long way,” Dr. Mary Martin, AAWD president, is quoted saying in an article on the group’s website.
Male or female, one thing’s certain: there’s a lot of debt involved in a startup, according to Antrim.
In her article, she said “remnants” of sexism persist but are not tolerated. And female dentists still have issues with benefits such as maternity leave, but that’s true of any self-employed woman, she wrote.
And Antrim wondered in her piece to other dentists if her feelings sometimes of not being taken seriously were due in fact to her gender.
“I’m not too sure,” she concluded, adding, “But quite frankly I don’t care because I use these assumptions as motivation to better myself and to excel.”
And she’s doing just that since opening late last year.
With a ton of advertising, an “amazing” staff and personal reserves of optimism, all’s going well in the practice, said the mother of two.
Clients speak highly of her, too; she has the highest rating on the website Yelp, five stars.
Jeff Clet is one of Antrim’s impressed patients. The former Gilroy and San Jose firefighter said she “has a positive attitude and she makes me feel relaxed and at ease. Her approach is always calm and professional.”
Antrim and husband Nick Skogen, a big-rig parts salesman for Gilroy’s RNC Engineering, have a daughter going on three years old and a five month-old son.
Born in Mountain View to a Japanese mother from the tiny island of Miyako, south of Okinawa, and a Ft. Wayne, Indiana-born dad of Irish descent who was stationed on Miyako during the Vietnam War, Antrim moved to Gilroy at age two.
She and Nick met in Gilroy High School, graduated in the Class of 2000 and dated for years before marrying.
Her dad was a copy machine technician and her mom a seamstress and waitress before she returned for several years to Japan to open an English language school. They still live in Antrim’s childhood home on London Drive.
“They are amazingly supportive, I would not have been able to do the things I have done without them,” said the dentist.
She also attributes success in a big way to when she was a high school sophomore and orthodontist Dr. John Wilkinson, who practices in Los Gatos and San Jose, fixed the crooked teeth that she said “stunted” her social growth and made her so uncomfortable around people.
And while his skills put her on the right road, realigning her self-confidence and self-image took a bit longer than straightening her teeth.
“I think I still had difficulty talking to people. It was a gradual change. After high school is probably when I felt more comfortable and felt a difference in my confidence.”
After high school also came an undergraduate degree from San Jose State University, UCLA dental school and a year of advanced training before a series of associate positions in small practices. That path led in 2011 to a position with Dr. Gary Nishimura of Gilroy, which she held till last year.
On her own now in general dentistry, she reflected on the dental care she received as a teen, when exactly she decided what she wanted to be when she grew up and how seedling thoughts slowly blossomed into a career.
“I don’t know if there was one specific point in time, there was just a lot of thinking about dentistry, I was drawn to it,” she said.
“It’s really such a privilege to have the ability to help people who are in pain or make a difference in how they feel about themselves,” she said, adding, “I love helping people.”
When called out on holidays and she has to drop everything to assist a patient, “I feel like a superhero sometimes,” she said.
And about obstacles to women in dentistry, the subject she found more difficult to write about than pulling teeth, Dr. Antrim said, “I think a lot of people doubted me (early on), but now that I have a few years under my belt, they don’t at all. I feel blessed. This profession has given me so much; it’s a phenomenal career for a woman.”
