General Probation - Need Advice!

[wheatbar]

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I asked about this in another thread but I wanted to create my own…Anyway, I am a sophomore at an Ivy with a 3.5 GPA and I was recently placed on academic probation due to my courseload (not due to performance; I had a low courseload first semester and then second semester withdrew from a class). Anyway, I was wondering if like law school you have to include the fact that you were on probation for a semester in your application (or if it is included in the letter from the health professions committee) and how this will effect my chances.

Does this pretty much disqualify me from admission? I haven't finished my dental school admissions requirements yet and I am majoring in the humanities/social sciences so I was considering doing a post-bac and having the letter come from my post-bac school instead of my undergraduate school. If it is self-reported, then it is a nonissue and I guess I will have to report (honesty is the best policy). If I do end up having to report this, do I still have a shot at top schools (Harvard, Columbia, U Penn) or are they out of the question?

 

[wheatbar]

I'm a little confused about how to explain this if I need to do so on my applications and in an interview in a way that won't decrease my chances. It was a difficult time for me for a lot reasons that have nothing to do with school - a close friend of mine died, then my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and there were a lot of family related things happened that were a distraction. But, what is frustrating to me is that I withdrew from the class after meeting with two assistant deans that never even mentioned that I would be placed on probation due to the number of credit unions that I took that year if I dropped it. They approved the drop. I later found out that it was school policy, but if I had known at the time that withdrawing from the class would have put me under the number of course units that I needed, I would have never dropped it. I don't think my school lists academic probation on my transcript though (FYI).

 

[2006Grad]

I asked about this in another thread but I wanted to create my own…Anyway, I am a sophomore at an Ivy with a 3.5 GPA and I was recently placed on academic probation due to my courseload (not due to performance; I had a low courseload first semester and then second semester withdrew from a class). Anyway, I was wondering if like law school you have to include the fact that you were on probation for a semester in your application (or if it is included in the letter from the health professions committee) and how this will effect my chances.

Does this pretty much disqualify me from admission? I haven't finished my dental school admissions requirements yet and I am majoring in the humanities/social sciences so I was considering doing a post-bac and having the letter come from my post-bac school instead of my undergraduate school. If it is self-reported, then it is a nonissue and I guess I will have to report (honesty is the best policy). If I do end up having to report this, do I still have a shot at top schools (Harvard, Columbia, U Penn) or are they out of the question?

You do have to report your probation. Also there are no "top" dental schools. Dental school is dental school.

 

[wheatbar]

What I meant by "top" is most selective. There certainly are dental schools that are more selective than others in terms of stats and some dental schools have a more national (or even international) pool of applicants than others. That is what I meant. I know on the application it asks you to report it, so I will. I would never want to be caught in a lie, and I think being honest in the process is important. But, my real question was how this will affect my chances (at any accredited dental school) and whether or not I should think about doing something else. I am really passionate about dentistry, but I will apply and then do a post-bac and reapply if necessary. Does anyone know anyone that has been on academic probation in the past and has been rejected/accepted to dental school?

 

[djeffreyt]

it will affect your admissions little to none, by which I mean it is probably as insignificant as adding a drop of vodka to a long island ice tea. If you continue to have academic probation for this issue throughout your schooling, then it will increase the affect it has on admissions, but an early freshman or sophmore year withdrawal and probation will probably be forgotten about if you start taking regular courseloads. Continue this problem, and the question of whether you can handle the courseload at a "top" or any dental school will come into question.

And on the same note as before...yes, there are more selective schools as far as stats, and if going to such a school is important to you, then you should take many classes a semester and get a higher GPA than 3.5 and a high DAT score. But a better, in my opinion, criteria for selecting which school you want to attend (rather than the school's statistics selectivity) is to consider what you want to get out of the school. Harvard is a very different type of school than Upenn. They way they teach, their general emphasis, the class size, and attitude of the school are all very different. Seeing as coming from any school, you can work hard to specialize and you'll still come out with the same degree (generally speaking), you should probably consider other factors more when deciding what school you want to attend.

Yes, I know...the response is always that you didn't mean to imply that you were only hoping to go to one of those schools cause they are statistically selective or ivy league schools, but that is what was implied by what you stated. Again, in my opinion.

 

[wheatbar]

Does anyone else have different ideas?

 

[wheatbar]

Bump

 

[lgwdnbdgr]

It won't be a problem as long as you can readily explain it. Lots of students take a part-time course load a semester or two for many, many reasons. You have a pretty damn good reason -- you don't want to attend any school that won't accept your explanation. I suspect few, if any, will count it against you. Some might even consider it a positive: under your circumstances, most students would probably take off the entire semester; you just dropped one class and still (presumably, given your GPA) did well in the remaining classes.