Incoming College Freshman Seeking Any Tips or Advice

[Unique_Username1]

I'm an incoming college freshman hoping to graduate within 3 years. Any advice on how I can make myself a strong dental school applicant? What activities should I focus on during my freshman year? Is there anything I should keep in mind? I'm not too sure where to start so any advice would be helpful.

Thanks!

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[2thDoc11]

Get good grades especially in your science courses. Join a club. get a job where you can get some healthcare experience. Doesn’t need to be dental related but obviously it’d be more beneficial if it is. Start shadowing early. volunteer. Do well on the DAT when it comes time to take it. Research is always nice to top it off. Personally, I think it’s more beneficial to push yourself with the course load (number of credits) rather then take it easy. Of course you don’t want to sacrifice your grades/social life in the process. It’s college after all, have some fun.

As far as shadowing and volunteering, I’d shoot for 100+ hours as a baseline.

 

[Redwing9]

If your school has a pre-professional office start there and make an appointment with the advisor ASAP. Set some goals and find out what it really takes to get into dental school especially your instate school if you have one.

Focus on grades, shadowing, and growing as a person, finding a job is a great idea even working retail talking to people helped me a lot.

Another thing you can do is join a pre-dental club on your campus, some are good some aren't so keep that in mind when deciding if it's worth your time I mostly avoided mine unless they had an interesting guest speaker.

Keep in mind that this is a marathon, each step will only get harder going from HS to college is hard, going from gen ed classes to upper-level classes will be hard, the DAT will be harder etc. etc. getting in shadowing hours now will be very beneficial so you aren't cramming them in at the end. 2 days a month will add up over 4 years if you want to finish with a ton of hours and you could probably do more if you wanted to.

Lastly take time for yourself to have some fun, the best candidates for dental school are very balanced. Not 4.0 types that never did anything else but study not to say you shouldn't try for a 4.0 in your freshman year that would be a great achievement.

 

[mascue]

Something that helped me establish a solid ground as a freshman:

1. This is possibly the only year where almost all your attention can go to getting good grades. This is also when classes are the easiest. Yes, people are gonna complain that genchem is hard, etc etc but a lot of work =/= conceptually hard course content. Freshman year generally is the easiest year to get good grades, so shoot for a 4.0 (I did and got it, and it really has helped me mentally sophomore year)

2. RATEMYPROFESSORS. If you wanna get a 4.0, working hard is one thing, but playing smart is another. Find a professor that is known to not grade harshly and throw out random exam questions. Ratemyprofessors has that (may be biased, but most of the time the reviews on there are correct).

3. Courseload. Kinda going off of #2, gotta play it smart. Although admissions from highschool -> college may have preferred a slightly lower gpa for taking extremely challenging courseloads, not for this type of admissions. High gpa > hard courseload. Science classes will be demanding, so find classes that can balance out the workload and will get you As without putting in too much effort. It'd be a plus if you actually enjoy this "easy" class, but sometimes it is what you gotta do to save your mental health.

3. Join some clubs. In the end, your ultimate goal is to stick to one or two clubs and climb to the highest position as possible within that club. Find the clubs you like, shoot for leadership positions in the years following.

4. Don't sweat on the idea of graduating earlier. If it works out for you, then that's great. If it doesn't, you gotta adapt to it. If you are sacrificing your GPA or too much mental health doing this, I don't think it's worth it.
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5. Go have fun! Attaining high GPA comes with sacrifices, but I think I would've gone insane if I didn't even go to a singular party lol

 

[frenzysword]

Study as hard as you can to achieve closer to 4.0

I had 3.7 in the first year of my college study then I graduated with 3.7 in the end.
1st year is a kind of foundation that involves a little bit of everything. Make sure you do well, build up your confidence, then you should be fine later on...

 

[allDAT]

If you don’t go the military route, don’t go to dental school. The costs are already unreasonably high. In 3 or 4 years, it’ll just be worse.