ortho: should I take the GRE now, before I start dental school?

[cupcake21]

I'm interested in pursuing ortho, and after looking at some programs, it seems like the GRE is required by most. Would it be smart to take it now, before I start my first year of dental school? I heard in some of my interviews that they may be changing the GRE requirement to the ADAT instead, so I wasn't sure.

On a side note, it looks like most ortho programs cost a decent amount for tuition, and a lot don't provide stipends. Does anyone have any insight into how you can justify taking out additional hundreds of thousands in loans for an additional 3 years of schooling? Just looking at the numbers makes me nervous after thinking about how expensive these next 4 years are gonna be haha

Thanks so much for any advice!

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[2TH MVR]

Can't help with the GRE question. As for pursuing ortho pre-DS. Make sure your stats are good enough to attend a cheaper DS or possibly the military. Also ... it is my opinion that the traditional state schools with dental and graduate programs will give you broader access to experience all the dental specialties on equal ground. While in DS with non-biased exposure to the all the specialties .... you may change your mind about ortho and consider general dentistry or another specialty.

As for ortho residency .... yeah .... stipends are great .... if you can get one. I was fortunate to attend a hospital program that offered a stipend. Back then .... hospital programs paid you a stipend based on the number of years post doctorate. They actually gave me credit for my AEGD .... so my stipend was actually larger than my classmates. Essentially this paid all my tuition and expenses during ortho residency.

 

[Big Time Hoosier]

Let me ask you a question first, have you finally decided if you’ll be ok as a general dentist should things not go as planned? (Is it worth it if I only want to do ortho?)

Good? Ok, I’d slow it down a bit. Why are you so dead set on ortho? You haven’t even started school. Why not wait a bit and see if something else intrigues you once you’ve actually jumped into it? I had a guy in my class just like you, absolutely gunning for ortho from day one. That is until we had our first ortho class and he found the field totally boring. Where’s he now? A 6 year OMS residency.

Does your school have grades/class rank? The competition in dental school is more “fierce” than undergrad. Are you going to be able to be in the top 20% to be in the running or top 10% to have a solid shot at it? School is P/F? Programs may want to see an exceptional ADAT score to give them an idea where you shake out compared to your peers from graded schools. From what I’ve read on SDN, it looks like the GRE is not a major point on your application.

Ortho also seems to be slightly obsessed with applicants having research experience. Is that something you have or are willing to get? And you’ll have to juggle this with everything else you’ll have going on.

So you see, there’s so much more to worry about here than the GRE. Just enjoy your time off until school starts. Just focus on doing your best first year to keep all of your options as open as possible and go from there.

Oh, and many ortho residencies charge a ton of tuition, like $200,000+. You cool with that? How much will you owe for dental school? You attending a pricey school? Ortho then could leave you $700,000+ in debt before you even see your first patient in private practice.

Good luck.

Big Hoss