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Hello all,
For the past couple months I have been considering dentistry as a future profession as opposed to my current goal of clinical psychology. I am currently studying psychology at a respected public university and have a good amount of volunteer/club experience under my belt. I guess to understand my situation, I need to explain my education history. During my junior year of high school, I entered a collegiate high school program that allowed me to graduate with an associate's degree. At the time, I was interested in medicine and opted to get my degree in biology. Though I earned my degree, I am not proud of the grades I earned in a majority of my science classes (which included a year of gen chem and bio) and my math classes (I failed trigonometry twice). I take full responsibility for this because quite frankly, I was no where near mature enough to handle college when I was 17. Regardless, I have been studying as a psych major at my university for a little under a year now and am doing much better academically. While passionate about psychology, I still yearn for a career in medicine and I feel like I might get bored as a psychologist. An advisor at my school's career center brought up dentistry as a potential path because it combined a lot of the interests I had reported to her and for the first time, I really began to look at all the aspects of the field. I've spent a few months thinking about my options and I think that I am going to keep my psychology major but I am going to add the dental school pre-reqs to my curriculum. I am concerned however, about my poor performance during my first two years of college. If I raise my GPA high enough, will admissions contribute my poor grades to a matter of immaturity and age as opposed to capacity? I am a much stronger student now and my head is definitely in the right place. Even though I'm technically a junior, I am still able to take many more classes without going over the credit hour limit as the university does not count my hours from my previous college (not to mention that I'm only 19 and not ready to for grad school just yet). I am confident in my abilities for organic chemistry, but I am worried about math. I have taken two upper level stats classes at my university but from what I understand, I would need to take trig and calculus for dental school. Is this true or are my stats classes (in conjunction with the pre calc and college algebra taken at my previous college) enough to fulfill the dental school math requirements? I would rather take physics without calc than go through trig and calc just to take physics with calc (because of time). I'm sorry for the relative lack of flow in this post but I'm kind of overwhelmed with questions 😕. I guess my overall question is whether or not I should take on this change of path or if I'd be wasting my time going for dental school. Does it sound like I could have a shot if I took the correct actions? Thank you!
For the past couple months I have been considering dentistry as a future profession as opposed to my current goal of clinical psychology. I am currently studying psychology at a respected public university and have a good amount of volunteer/club experience under my belt. I guess to understand my situation, I need to explain my education history. During my junior year of high school, I entered a collegiate high school program that allowed me to graduate with an associate's degree. At the time, I was interested in medicine and opted to get my degree in biology. Though I earned my degree, I am not proud of the grades I earned in a majority of my science classes (which included a year of gen chem and bio) and my math classes (I failed trigonometry twice). I take full responsibility for this because quite frankly, I was no where near mature enough to handle college when I was 17. Regardless, I have been studying as a psych major at my university for a little under a year now and am doing much better academically. While passionate about psychology, I still yearn for a career in medicine and I feel like I might get bored as a psychologist. An advisor at my school's career center brought up dentistry as a potential path because it combined a lot of the interests I had reported to her and for the first time, I really began to look at all the aspects of the field. I've spent a few months thinking about my options and I think that I am going to keep my psychology major but I am going to add the dental school pre-reqs to my curriculum. I am concerned however, about my poor performance during my first two years of college. If I raise my GPA high enough, will admissions contribute my poor grades to a matter of immaturity and age as opposed to capacity? I am a much stronger student now and my head is definitely in the right place. Even though I'm technically a junior, I am still able to take many more classes without going over the credit hour limit as the university does not count my hours from my previous college (not to mention that I'm only 19 and not ready to for grad school just yet). I am confident in my abilities for organic chemistry, but I am worried about math. I have taken two upper level stats classes at my university but from what I understand, I would need to take trig and calculus for dental school. Is this true or are my stats classes (in conjunction with the pre calc and college algebra taken at my previous college) enough to fulfill the dental school math requirements? I would rather take physics without calc than go through trig and calc just to take physics with calc (because of time). I'm sorry for the relative lack of flow in this post but I'm kind of overwhelmed with questions 😕. I guess my overall question is whether or not I should take on this change of path or if I'd be wasting my time going for dental school. Does it sound like I could have a shot if I took the correct actions? Thank you!
