What are the things that you like and dislike about the school? Sorry my PMs were not working.
Tufts has almost every speciality (notably no residency in oral pathology, but there are oral pathologists there) and some other elective/not-recognized residencies in esthetics and implant dentistry for example. Board exams are given at school so you don't have to travel anywhere on exam day. Hospital affiliation. The school is old and well-known, also well known internationally. International students seem to adjust ok. MA has good dental insurance compared to other states, Mass Health covers scaling/root planing and a lot of patients will have Mass Health insurance. The simulation clinic is nice. Yankee Dental Congress is close by and there are many other dental schools close by for socializing. The train (the "T") has a direct stop under Tufts. Boston is big on education, not a bad city to go to school in.
Tufts has numerous drawbacks including: tuition, cost of living, competitive environment w/ the majority of classes being taken for a letter grade. Most facilities for UG students suck. If you are planning on specializing you'll want to go somewhere else; every single PG program at tufts charges 100k+ tuition except for oral surgery which charges... 35k (your 60k salary - taxes/35k tuition= you live off of 25k). Merritt auditorium, the main lecture hall for every single class, had a bed bug infestation. The one and only student lounge (roughly 700sq foot lounge for 1000+ dental students in the building) was also shuttered for months due to bed bug infestation. Used to be a very nice lady who ran a soup restaurant next to the lounge. Soup store has been gone for years. Never replaced with anything; you can get lunch at the hospital or the library. Class year of 2020 will likely have delayed graduation and be forced to spend additional money on rent and tuition into the summer/fall this year. The PG clinics get all the advanced cases and even have nicer gloves. Limited to seeing 3 patients a day. Requirements are not the best; 3-4 root canals will satisfy endo graduation requirement, it just takes one procedure on one molar and you're all set. You get points just for assisting PG students upstairs. Stairs= inequality. All the best stuff is saved for those who are on higher floors. The administrators occupy the 15th floor of course. The scraps at the bottom 2-4 floors are relegated to UG students. Very difficult to get implant experience, only a handful of students are chosen for the implant selective. Selectives in general are far and few in between. Have to do a selective if you want to learn to use nitrous oxide or anything that specialists do. Humongous class size (up to 210 + 30-40 IS students come second year).
They are not very open about how much debt you will be in, and the challenges that you will face, and how many of your classmates won't make it. For the past 3 years the first-time board passing rate was about 70%... which is extremely bad. Roughly 1/3 of the class fails every year, pretty consistently for the last few years. (The pass rate ranges between 65% to 80%). The student affairs dept are a bunch of animals who are only looking out for themselves and they continue to throw students under the bus. 10 students from my class are gone already, and roughly a dozen more probably won't make it to graduation (some are just demoted to the class year below, but many of those students will end up getting dismissed later). One guy got kicked out for allegedly raping another classmate (he was a male stripper, but many don't believe he actually did it). Most people get kicked out for academic reasons or they have really bad hand skills and didn't improve. Imagine getting dismissed after you have accumulated 50k debt from undergrad, 70k from masters, and 240k from tufts; assuming 3 years of school post-undergrad, that's almost 400k of debt with no DMD to show for it. Your life is over, you are now doing IBR until you die and your chances of admission to a different graduate program are now less than 1% due to your tarnished academic record.
This isn't a joke; this was the harsh reality for roughly a dozen of my classmates, I'm expecting 12-20 won't make it to graduation and will have this happen to them. For those who were demoted, they have to pay for the semester that they retake which is 60-90k depending on their situation. The average indebtedness for those who graduated on time in 2019 was 360k. Future graduates are looking at 400k+ debt on average even if you do everything right (these numbers include people whose parents pay for school or who got a scholarship and have no debt). People who take out loans for everything (which is a lot of people; I know many people who request extra funds, you can ask for another 5-7k each year) can expect 500-600k of debt. 600k+ for D24 class.
Dentist incomes grew for the last 5 years, but due to coronavirus and increasing PPE costs, I would expect dentist incomes to fall in 2020/2021. Tuition will continue to increase 3-7% every year. The administration announced a pay freeze/ hiring freeze so clearly the school is broke. The D20 class year will be hurting enormously because the job market is so weak. Many students secured jobs very early (signed job offers in fall, but don't graduate until may). These jobs and in some cases residencies, will be put on hold because most 4th years likely won't be able to graduate until july.
Extremely old student body; average age is like 34. Over half the class has masters degrees yet a third of students fail their boards every year. Because students cheat/study only to pass tests and don't retain info for the boards. Tufts cares about money more than anything. Students care more about their grades than anything else. Infopack cheating scandal. Cheating scandals in 2012, 2014 and now 2020 related to online testing (they continue to let us take online exams, maybe because there is no other option. They sent a message to our entire class, but never followed up or said how many students were involved; idk what they did to address it.)
The coronavirus has highlighted many of the things that I dislike about Tufts. Tufts even told us that we were at "low" risk and made us keep coming in to school until March 16th. They even started running out of masks and ppe which was ridiculous. Tufts, Boston, and the entire state of Massachusetts are at "high" risk now. The administration did a really bad job and they pat themselves on the back anyway.
Generally you are so busy studying you won't really care. A huge plus is that 70% of classes are lecture captured so you can stay home and watch them instead of coming to class. The nutrition school and associated schools in the boston campus are also nice, although there is a lack of a "campus" feel and downtown/chinatown is busy//loud/crowded and has gotten really expensive over the years.
Hope this helps... if you are a D24 don't worry about the summer reading assignment it's just bs
