Is it too late? What is my next step?

[scott326]

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Hello guys!

I am a pre-dental student going into my third year of study at
University of Toronto. I have always wanted to become a dentist
and am now beginning to take action to prepare for getting into
good dental schools in the States. ( UPenn, Columbia and NYU are some of the schools
I am aiming at)

I have put much efforts into academics and I have a failry strong
G.P.A ( cumulative g.p.a of 3.98). <<Most of Canadian dental schools
put most emphasis on G.P.A so 3.90+ is a must-have in order to get into
dental schools..>>
I have not written DAT yet (thinking of writing Canadian DAT in November).

My extracurriculars are

a) volunteering at nursing home for 3 years (while at high school)
b) tutoring high school students (at a private institute)
c) Vice President of the U of Toronto Trinity College Korean Student Association ( for more than 3 years by the time of graduation)
d) volunteer teacher for students in financial needs
e) planning on volunteering at a hospital for the next 2 years
f) member of hospitality minister at local Catholic church
g) translation duty at local company

it seems a lot but one thing that bothers me the most is that
i recently switched my interest onto going into dentistry so that
I have not shawdowed a dentist yet. Also, U of Toronto is a big school
(bigger than you would ever imagine - like 1500 ppl in one class!) so
it has been very difficult for me to get to know the prof and have the prof
know about me. So, I am very worried about getting a LOR.

So, my question is, what can I do to improve my stats?
I definitely need job shadowing but how can I start?
I know strong G.P.A and DAT scores do not guarantee admission
but can they compensate for my lack of a good LOR and dental experience
to a certain degree?

tHANK YOU IN advance!
cheers,

 

[alexamasan]

Well, I think nearly all schools require at least a minimum amount of hours of experience. Some people here have had only 30 hours of experience and were accepted into dental school. But others require many hours though, so you would have to call up admissions office of the schools to find out how much experience they want you to have (I found out that simply looking at their website isn't enough as they sometimes don't list all of their requirements on the website).

I wouldn't really consider shadowing a job. You could just ask a dentist (who is not in your family) to shadow him/her and ask for a letter of recommendation after a while.

Many schools do require a letter of recommendation from a dentist, so even if you do have good stats everywhere else, if you don't have everything the school asks for, your application wills simply be incomplete and they will not look at it. So it is always good to have a letter from a dentist.

As long as you have their requirements in terms of letters and hours of experience, you should be fine. Though do remember that some schools require more hours than others, so you might as well get a lot of hours (at least 100 hours).