shadowing

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Hey,

I think nowadays, they really want you to have at least something to show that you're interested in the profession and have taken the steps to show you're interested in the profession (aka shadowing) and are really set on it.

Many "top schools" now require X number of hours or recommend it, so I'd assume most people do at least something. But I'd probably think there are the rare situations in which someone might not have it (perhaps if they're interested in research only?)

Obviously, I'm no adcom member at a "top dental school" so have no idea and I'm merely providing you with my opinion.

But I'd hope all pre-dents do shadow for a couple of reasons: 1) to see if you're interested in the field and make sure of it, and 2) it's fun to see what your future perhaps holds, and if nothing else, you'll learn tips on what you'd like to do in the future or not, if you have a private practice or what not
 
I think what he is getting at is that you don't need shadowing to be accepted into dental school if you have amazing grades. UCLAzy has amazing grades and amazing test scores and only has five hours of shadowing, yet still has two acceptances at top schools and an interview at Harvard.

Does this bother anyone else other than me? I think it is total BS that top schools would accept an applicant with only 5 shadowing hours. UCLAzy this is honestly not meant to attack you so please don't take offense to this comment, you have worked your butt off to get amazing grades and amazing test scores, but I just don't understand how two top dental schools can accept an applicant without shadowing hours? How do they know that you will be a good fit for the profession, and the profession is a good fit for you? How do they know that you will not get sick of dental school half way through and drop out and begin a career as a stripper? Just joking about the stripper part, but seriously this bugs me so much.

Just because you get good grades it does not directly translate into a good dentist, nor does it translate into a dentist that is going into the profession for the right reasons. I was under the impression that schools took a look at the overall applicant, but i guess grades/dat just trumps everything when it comes down to it. UCLAzy I'm not implying that you aren't a well rounded applicant, nor am i implying that you are going into the profession for the wrong reasons, so again please don't think that I am attacking you, because I don't know about your other EC's, or your LOR's, or your PS. But I am just saying, wouldn't you guys think that schools would want a little bit more than 5 hours of shadowing?
 
i dont really take offence. it's the internet after all.

aside from details about specific procedures (which is the entire point of going to school for 4 years), what do you think you gain from shadowing 100 hours versus 1 day? i've been around this forum for quite a while and everybody says 100 hrs is "safe", and i just feel like that is such a waste of time and, in my case, it would have been. you say i am an applicant without shadowing hours but i'm not: i went, saw what it was like, and moved on.

in response to: "How do they know that you will not get sick of dental school half way through and drop out and begin a career as a stripper?"

shadowing a dentist, who is pro at doing all of the procedures already, tells you nothing about if you will drop out of dental school. if that's the point of shadowing, it seems like they should have us shadow dental students and see their trials and tribulations, rather than the person we may or may not become 5-10 years out of school. or don't shadow at all and make all students be an assistant before entering school.

dropping out of dental school is about your character and ability to overcome failure than how many hours you watched, or at least that's my opinion.
 
RSalha17 said:
don't need shadowing to be accepted into dental school if you have amazing grades. [/B
Exhibit A is speaking lol. I did shadowing for a month but I didn't write it on my application because I left due to unethical behavior I was witnessing. I don't believe in twisting your moral compass in order to get a good letter of recommendation.

I did, however, include that I plan to do 100 hours over this winter break and summer. I got into numerous schools.
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RSalha17 said:
I think what he is getting at is that you don't need shadowing to be accepted into dental school if you have amazing grades. UCLAzy has amazing grades and amazing test scores and only has five hours of shadowing, yet still has two acceptances at top schools and an interview at Harvard.

Does this bother anyone else other than me? I think it is total BS that top schools would accept an applicant with only 5 shadowing hours. UCLAzy this is honestly not meant to attack you so please don't take offense to this comment, you have worked your butt off to get amazing grades and amazing test scores, but I just don't understand how two top dental schools can accept an applicant without shadowing hours? How do they know that you will be a good fit for the profession, and the profession is a good fit for you? How do they know that you will not get sick of dental school half way through and drop out and begin a career as a stripper? Just joking about the stripper part, but seriously this bugs me so much.

Just because you get good grades it does not directly translate into a good dentist, nor does it translate into a dentist that is going into the profession for the right reasons. I was under the impression that schools took a look at the overall applicant, but i guess grades/dat just trumps everything when it comes down to it. UCLAzy I'm not implying that you aren't a well rounded applicant, nor am i implying that you are going into the profession for the wrong reasons, so again please don't think that I am attacking you, because I don't know about your other EC's, or your LOR's, or your PS. But I am just saying, wouldn't you guys think that schools would want a little bit more than 5 hours of shadowing?
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UCLAzy and qnzbabi both have low shadowing hours yet are in at amazing schools. Are you suggesting that the adcoms don't have the correct methodology of selecting students?

Shadowing is not a badge of honor. You stand in a room and try not to get in the way of the dentist and his or her staff; a block of wood could do that. Shadowing is for your benefit. In these days when schools run from $200k-400k, the moment you start paying for tuition for dental school, those golden handcuffs come on and it becomes difficult to divorce from the profession.

UCLAzy and qnzbabi both have applications that display exceptional academic prowess. IMHO, that far surpasses being a block of wood, whether for 100 hours or 1000 hours.
 
Anything more than a 100 or so is a useless ornament.
I'm guessing that if you have extraordinary stats then they'd expect you to be smart enough to know what you're getting yourself into without having more hours of shadowing.
 
RSalha17 said:
Just because you get good grades it does not directly translate into a good dentist
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Neither does shadowing. A convicted felon could be just as good at shadowing as me or anyone else.

Shadowing more hours does increase the likelihood that you'll experience a patient interaction that draws you to the profession at an emotional level; otherwise, it's just objective observation. Nothing worth talking about.
 
Anything more than a 100 or so is a useless ornament.

Honestly, I think a big part of why I'm getting interviewed is my "shadowing" experience.. I have 2,280 hours experience as a dental assistant and I think it is giving my application a big boost. Because frankly, I had a D in Orgo 2, with C's in Orgo 1 and GenChem 2.
 
UCLAzy said:
i dont really take offence. it's the internet after all.

aside from details about specific procedures (which is the entire point of going to school for 4 years), what do you think you gain from shadowing 100 hours versus 1 day? i've been around this forum for quite a while and everybody says 100 hrs is "safe", and i just feel like that is such a waste of time and, in my case, it would have been. you say i am an applicant without shadowing hours but i'm not: i went, saw what it was like, and moved on.

in response to: "How do they know that you will not get sick of dental school half way through and drop out and begin a career as a stripper?"

shadowing a dentist, who is pro at doing all of the procedures already, tells you nothing about if you will drop out of dental school. if that's the point of shadowing, it seems like they should have us shadow dental students and see their trials and tribulations, rather than the person we may or may not become 5-10 years out of school. or don't shadow at all and make all students be an assistant before entering school.

dropping out of dental school is about your character and ability to overcome failure than how many hours you watched, or at least that's my opinion.
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I would like to disagree about one point. One of the things you gain from having a lot of shadowing experience is essentially the knowledge that you will NOT get sick and tired of the doing the same monotonous procedures day in and day out. You would be surprised how tiring it can be following a dentist around and assisting in the procedures 8 hours a day, 4-5x a week for an entire summer.

If you still want to be a dentist after that, then it just makes your desire and interest to attend dental school that more genuine. This is especially helpful motivation when you are going through the grueling motions in dental school.

How do you know that once you are suffering through dschool and the clinics that you won't realize that you actually hate what you are doing?

TLDR: Shadowing experience is not a waste of your time as long as you are actively engaged with it. To say otherwise is nonsense and I would question your genuine interest in dentistry.
 
@bif: assisting is not shadowing. assisting is useful while shadowing is a complete time sink after not very many hours

@eggs: if dentistry 5 days a week is too boring, do it 4 days and make less. if you want something else in your life, become a part time clinical faculty at a school. have a hobby. dont work 8 hours a day. the few dentists i know all have to do SOMETHING other than direct patient interaction to keep them sane. thinking you wont get bored is naive, imho.
 
Zbtb7 said:
UCLAzy and qnzbabi both have low shadowing hours yet are in at amazing schools. Are you suggesting that the adcoms don't have the correct methodology of selecting students?

Shadowing is not a badge of honor. You stand in a room and try not to get in the way of the dentist and his or her staff; a block of wood could do that. Shadowing is for your benefit. In these days when schools run from $200k-400k, the moment you start paying for tuition for dental school, those golden handcuffs come on and it becomes difficult to divorce from the profession.

UCLAzy and qnzbabi both have applications that display exceptional academic prowess. IMHO, that far surpasses being a block of wood, whether for 100 hours or 1000 hours.
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Everyone always takes my comments to an extreme. Don't be ridiculous I'm obviously not saying that dental schools don't know what they are doing or choosing wrong students with the wrong methodology. If I wanted to say that I would have. And I am not saying you need more than 50 or 100 hours of shadowing because I completely agree that it is absolutely pointless if the dentist does not help to engage you in his practices. If he doesn't, you sit there awkwardly and watch them do the same stuff over and over just so you can say that you have hours, but for the dentists that make it worth while, it makes you realize why you want to get into the profession.

I am however saying that 5 hours is a little bit ridiculous. Not learning specialties first-hand, not observing different general dentists to get an idea of how different practices are run, not having an idea of how a dentist works with patients and ethical standards that are upheld in a practice (obviously you won't get every dentist to paint a perfect picture because of the example above, but that is just more of a reason to shadow different dentists). If OP did not have amazing grades and test scores, they would have laughed in his face and rejected him in an instant. The only thing that bothers me about this is I feel that they should hold all applicants to the same standards. An applicant should not be exempt from shadowing different types of dentists just because they are a genius.
 
scrambledgreggs said:
I would like to disagree about one point. One of the things you gain from having a lot of shadowing experience is essentially the knowledge that you will NOT get sick and tired of the doing the same monotonous procedures day in and day out. You would be surprised how tiring it can be following a dentist around and assisting in the procedures 8 hours a day for an entire summer.

If you still want to be a dentist after that, then it just makes your desire and interest to attend dental school that more genuine. This is especially helpful motivation when you are going through the grueling motions in dental school.

How do you know that once you are suffering through dschool and the clinics that you won't realize that you actually hate what you are doing?
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The act of watching a dentist uses just as much brain power as watching T.V. and it is incomparable to the mentally and physically demanding surgeries performed as a dentist. My goodness, if actually practicing dentistry was as boring as merely watching a dentist do all the fun spatial thinking and technical surgery, I wouldn't have pursued it. If the sole purpose of shadowing is to find out if you'll get bored of watching something unrelated to actually doing dentistry, you as might as well as just watch Youtube videos of dentists. A better way to gauge if you would enjoy what dentists do would be to join a jewelery- or sculpture-making class.

However, shadowing does expose you to some dentist-patient interaction, good and bad. And again, it increases the incidence of observing a special experience where you see a dentist change someone's life, not their physical life but their emotional life by enhancing their appearance and increasing their self-confidence or providing someone with the ability to eat and talk or taking away debilitating toothaches so that they can live pain-free lives.
 
UCSFx2016 said:
The act of watching a dentist uses just as much brain power as watching T.V. and it is incomparable to the mentally and physically demanding surgeries performed as a dentist. My goodness, if actually practicing dentistry was as boring as merely watching a dentist do all the spatial thinking and technical surgery, I wouldn't have pursued it. If the sole purpose of shadowing is to find out if you'll get bored of watching something unrelated to actually doing dentistry, you as might as well as just watch Youtube videos of dentists. A better way to gauge if you would enjoy what dentists do would be to join a jewelery- or sculpture-making class.

However, shadowing does expose you to some dentist-patient interaction, good and bad.
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That is what I am trying to say. Patient-provider interaction is one of the most important parts of being a dentist and that is something you learn from being in an office, whether it is boring or not. It is something that you aren't going to learn from a book, or from TV shows watching a dentist. And it is something that you need to experience from different people in different places and from different points of view. THAT is how you begin assessing how you will interact with patients, you take the positives from good interactions and lose the negatives from the bad interactions. This is only something you will get from observing different dentists. How can you really sit there and say that you only need 5 hours of shadowing to know if you want to be a dentist and all the other things that go along with it? It isn't only drilling and filling. There is a whole different social aspect that intertwines itself with the physical aspects, and through time and DIFFERENT experiences, you learn DIFFERENT things that you can take with you in the future.
 
UCSFx2016 said:
The act of watching a dentist uses just as much brain power as watching T.V. and it is incomparable to the mentally and physically demanding surgeries performed as a dentist. My goodness, if actually practicing dentistry was as boring as merely watching a dentist do all the spatial thinking and technical surgery, I wouldn't have pursued it. If the sole purpose of shadowing is to find out if you'll get bored of watching something unrelated to actually doing dentistry, you as might as well as just watch Youtube videos of dentists. A better way to gauge if you would enjoy what dentists do would be to join a jewelery- or sculpture-making class.

However, shadowing does expose you to some dentist-patient interaction, good and bad.
Click to expand...

I disagree, the dentist I worked for had me constantly active the whole time. I was prepping tools, handing it off, holding suction, or she was discussing the procedure with me and showing me everything she did down to selecting different burrs for different things. And when we weren't prepping, she was discussing with me how to run the office, manage staff, and giving me mini-business lessons.

My experience is in conflict with the general assessment of shadowing here. I found it to be an invaluable experience that gave me a really good look at the day to day life of a dentist that I really could not have got any other way.

If you think watching a procedure is boring, I think you are in for a big surprise my friend.
 
scrambledgreggs said:
I disagree, the dentist I worked for had me constantly active the whole time. I was prepping tools, handing it off, holding suction, or she was discussing the procedure with me and showing me everything she did down to selecting different burrs for different things. And when we weren't prepping, she was discussing with me how to run the office, manage staff, and giving me mini-business lessons.

My experience is in conflict with the general assessment of shadowing here. I found it to be an invaluable experience that gave me a really good like at the day to day life of a dentist that I really could not have got any other way.

If you think watching a procedure is boring, I think you are in for a big surprise my friend.
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I completely agree with this. Maybe if you found the shadowing so boring then you should have left that dentist, and attempted to get another view from a different dentist, rather than compliantly achieving hours to put on your application.
 
RSalha17 said:
That is what I am trying to say. Patient-provider interaction is one of the most important parts of being a dentist and that is something you learn from being in an office, whether it is boring or not. It is something that you aren't going to learn from a book, or from TV shows watching a dentist. And it is something that you need to experience from different people in different places and from different points of view. THAT is how you begin assessing how you will interact with patients, you take the positives from good interactions and lose the negatives from the bad interactions. This is only something you will get from observing different dentists. How can you really sit there and say that you only need 5 hours of shadowing to know if you want to be a dentist and all the other things that go along with it? It isn't only drilling and filling. There is a whole different social aspect that intertwines itself with the physical aspects, and through time and DIFFERENT experiences, you learn DIFFERENT things that you can take with you in the future.
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And you'll get plenty of that in dental school. It's neither a necessity for an undergrad nor a necessity for getting into dental school, which was the point of UCLazy. It's just a nice thing to have because it solidifies your decision but it is far from being an absolute necessity.
 
specialties are like majors in undergrad. everybody has this idealistic view, but the whole point of learning to become a GENERAL dentist is to get exposure to each specialty. this reminds me of the eager freshman who is 163% sure they want to be an engineer, but takes a biology class and falls in love. seriously how much of each procedure can you see without loupes. i cant imagine what you learned about endo from peering over a shoulder at an odd angle..

and also, why arent you held to MY standards of good grades? why would they even give the same opportunity to someone who scored better than only 60 or 70% of applicants, or who, on average, retained 25% less information than i did during my undergrad (4.0 vs 3.0)?

see what i did there? fairness is all in the eyes of the beholder =P. in actuality, i dont really care what your gpa or dat was since we'll all be colleagues. i just always see ppl pushing the "100 hrs shadowing" bit and dont think it's good advice, to anyone, ever.
 
RSalha17 said:
I completely agree with this. Maybe if you found the shadowing so boring then you should have left that dentist, and attempted to get another view from a different dentist, rather than compliantly achieving hours to put on your application.
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You don't need +1000 hours to find out that dentistry is boring to you.
Unless you process things very slowly in your head, it should only take you a few procedures for you to realize that dentistry is boring.
I would only need to be in a podiatrist's office for less than an hour to realize it's not for me.
 
UCLAzy said:
i just always see ppl pushing the "100 hrs shadowing" bit and dont think it's good advice, to anyone, ever.
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100 hours is safe because many schools highly recommend it.
 
schools highly recommend a lot of things, especially courses. i'd argue that 100 hours of anatomy is more worthwhile than 100 hours of shadowing. but then again, i'm just a nerd..
 
scrambledgreggs said:
If you think watching a procedure is boring, I think you are in for a big surprise my friend.
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All professions will inevitably become monotonous and they're supposed to. You don't want to have a seasoned dentist to find endo as challenging as it was when they did their first root canal as a dental student. With mastery come familiarity. Imagine how quickly sitting down with your hands underneath your lap and watching someone do all the work becomes boring and mentally unfulfilling. Shadowing is not dentistry and it's a poor simulator of what it's like to do dentistry. If you seriously enjoy shadowing for thousands of hours, you're missing out on more challenging activities.
 
UCLAzy said:
schools highly recommend a lot of things, especially courses. i'd argue that 100 hours of anatomy is more worthwhile than 100 hours of shadowing. but then again, i'm just a nerd..
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Why not just do both instead of haphazardly shadowing a dentist for a duration shorter than the length of watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy?

And just to be clear with everyone else on my stance on shadowing, I think 100 hours is sufficient and thousands of hours of strictly shadowing, not including assisting, is a pointless waste of time.
 
haha feel free to haphazardly judge me. shadowing a dentist in private practice is certainly not the only way to learn about dentistry though. again the point wasnt for everybody to shadow half a day, just proof that 100 hrs isnt some required thing as the hive-minded-sdn seems to believe. just like ppl get in with 3.0. etc etc
 
UCLAzy said:
haha feel free to haphazardly judge me. shadowing a dentist in private practice is certainly not the only way to learn about dentistry though. again the point wasnt for everybody to shadow half a day, just proof that 100 hrs isnt some required thing as the hive-minded-sdn seems to believe. just like ppl get in with 3.0. etc etc
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I'm sure your n = 1 will shake loose the paradigm of applying to dental school
 
RSalha17 said:
If OP did not have amazing grades and test scores, they would have laughed in his face and rejected him in an instant. The only thing that bothers me about this is I feel that they should hold all applicants to the same standards. An applicant should not be exempt from shadowing different types of dentists just because they are a genius.
Click to expand...

You're weighing the admissions process based on what's fair to you as an applicant. The adcoms are choosing based on who is best for their school and faculty.

Exceptions are made for exceptional people.
 
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