What kind of person is the ideal dental school applicant/candidate? In particular, I'm wondering to what extent dentist shadowing, community service and holding jobs while in school matter in admissions? Let's say I have stellar grades and a DAT score, but only about 25-50hrs of shadowing and pretty mediocre community involvement, would that be a huge set back in my dental school applications?
I'm asking because it just seems that on this message board, and on the predents site, everyone seems to be amazingly well-rounded applicants (i.e, presidents of their universities pre-dental society, grads w/ honors, 1000+ community service and shadowing hours), are websites like this representative of ALL applicants? Do "normal" people who have a minimal number of shadowing hours and pretty low-key extracurriculars get in as well, (let's say they have a 3.5+ gpa)?
There are SOOOO many factors thats.... its simply impossible to come up with 1 safe answer to satisfy all 59 dental schools.
There is a general trend tho, those with competitive GPAs and DATs tend to have an easier time landing interviews.... HOWEVER you can play things in your favor if your numbers aren't exactly within the correct range..
Here is what I mean. You can be a guy with a 3.7 GPA, 3.7 sGPA, and 22DAT (great numbers), but you've made the silly mistake of only applying to your state school. Incidentally, you didn't get accepted, there were too many qualified applicants this cycle and they decided to go with others.
On the other hand, you can be a guy with a 3.3 GPA, 3.3 sGPA, and 19 DAT ("okay" numbers, lower than average), but you applied wit 15+ schools..... This guy has a better chance of getting in than the previous guy.
Like previous posters suggested, GPA+DAT are the most important criteria. Shadowing is
HIGHLY recommended, and I think it can lead to rejections after the interview because you didn't have a solid answer for "why do you want to be a dentist".... its so hard to answer this without any shadowing / observation experience.... I think shadowing hours between 50-150 is ideal, and actually some schools have shadowing requirements (like 50, 100, and even one has 150 ~ forgot which)
As far as volunteering / community involvement goes.... I don't think anyone knows exactly how much this plays. I do know though that pretty much EVERY dental school highly recommends its applicants to have been involved with helping their community. And I've never seen actual required hours. I had approx 300-350 volunteering hours between various activities, and it felt like it was okay for me. Some will have alot more, others alot less.
Ya know, here is a kicker. If you click under any one of us's names, where it says "
Pre-Dental".... your going to get a list of ALL the pre-dental students oh SDN. There are approx 4800 members. Thats about40% of the applicant pool. I am assuming 1/2 of these 4800 have accounts on pre-dents.com so.... pre-dents isn't the most ideal way to look at statistics. Its only 20% of the pre-dental population.