Grettlin, this is for you!

[Yah-E]

Grettlin,

Your Pre-health advisor is correct! To boost your pre-dental resume, you should get lots of hours in shadowing/observing dentists or dental specialists. Now days all our applicant colleagues has 3.5 GPAs and 20/20 DATs, you want to distinguish yourself and your application by having ample orientation to dentistry. Plus, I want to say that many dental schools now are strongly suggesting their applicants to have x amount of hours of dental exposure to be even considered!

Now a couple of thing that I want to add:

1) Volunteering in hospital is not a bad thing to add to your resume! Anytime where you have opportunities to interact with people in a clinical setting is a plus for your dental application! Just make sure that you also get some dental exposure in dental clinics to orient yourself to your dream profession of dentistry.

2) About "hundreds of hours" in a dental clinics? Obviously the more the better, but as long as you go once a week for a couple of months, you'd surprised how fast those hours add up! Make sure you jot everything down from the date and time to what you saw/experienced!

In my opinion, there are four major components to any applicant that admissions committee does look at:

A) GPA
B) DAT scores
C) Orientation to Dentistry
D) You (EC, motivation, maturity, etc.)

You obviously want to boost as much as you can in all four areas. If you lack in one, then try to increase in others.

Hey thanks for asking me, I hope that my $0.02 helped! Happy shadowing and be sure to ask questions about what you saw. You'd be amazed how much you'll learn!

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[grettlin]

Hi Yah-ZZZ,
I really appreciate the information you gave me, thanks. I am too busy to go to this site until now. I think I will go ahead to find a clinic to get some experience (hope they will accept me ).
For NYU interview, if you have time, why don't you try? You might treat it as backup. If you finally have to go there, you might think about transfering to others?
Again, Yah-ZZZ, thank you!

 

[Yah-E]

Grettlin,

You're right, I think that I'm going to call NYU and schedule an interview for late March or early April just to be safe! Thanks!

 

[grettlin]

Yah-ZZZ,
Hi, have you scheduled your trip to NYU? I have a question about the good information you just gave me . For GPA part, do you think the GPA for dental school has been raised as high as Med school, like 3.5? 3.5 to me is an very very very good grade, but I would like to know your opinion about GPA. My prehealth advisor told me 3.2 or 3.3 + DAT 18 or 19 would be accetp by most of the dental schools. How do you think?
By the way, I just called two dental clinic asking for volunteer job, and it seems going smoothly. Thank you for your suggestion!

 

[Yah-E]

Grettlin,

First of all, thanks for asking me! Secondly, as your health advisor said 3.2 or 3.3 GPA + 18 and 19 DATs will get you into some dental schools, but not all! These stats are recommended by dental schools as minimum to be considered as competitive!

I want to say that most dental schools now are looking at more than just GPAs and DATs, that is why you and I talked about how important it is for you to shadow dentists with our previous posts.

It depends what dental schools you want to apply to, they all have their perks in requirements! Obviously you want your GPAs and DATs as high as you can get them, but if you lack in one area, then try to improve in the other!

As far as 3.5 GPA, again it depends on what dental schools that you want to apply to. For some dental schools, 3.5 GPA is their average of incoming class every year! There are schools with this type of high standards, but I want to say the national average acceptees for 50+ dental schools are around 3.2 - 3.3!

For further stats and info, try visiting this site:

<a href="http://www.predental.com/gpastatistics.htm" target="_blank">http://www.predental.com/gpastatistics.htm</a>

Hope this helps!