Ok, so I am at a jc right now and I have got into uc Davis uc Santa Barbara and cal state Chico. I have been planning on going to Chico just because it's cheaper and closer to my house. I also have friends I plan on living with. However people are putting in my head that it's "not as superior" as the other schools blah blah blah. But I look at it this way.... If I complete Chico and maintain a solid gpa 3.4+ then it shouldn't matter to dental schools where I attend?
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Undergrad school matter?? Advice
- Thread starter ThNeal
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Prestige doesn't matter.
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The rigor of your undergraduate institution does matter. This is especially true if you intend on attending dental school in California. Since two of the six dental school in California are UC schools, you are best off going to a UC school and aim at obtaining a very high GPA 3.5+. - Admissions to Medicine
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This topic has been covered routinely. Go to the cheaper and easier school. I would say that a 3.7+ GPA and a 21+ DAT, coupled with decent ECs will get you in somewhere. No school cares about prestige.
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I think prestige might matter to ivy league schools, but GPA and DAT is always most important. Also, it matters more for networking and other opportunities that closed-knit alumni give to each other. I am lucky to have gone to a school that really sold its "alumni network" because of it being small and prestigious, and that alumni network has paid many dividends and opened many doors in my current career (I'm a nontraditional).
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If a dental school has gotten strong students with similar stats from a school before, then it will often accept that student with the similar stats. Prestige and precedence are correlated, but it is not the prestige directly getting kids in. Columbia takes low gpa, high DAT from my school every year because past students have set the precedent for having those stats and doing well in dental school. My school has several kids going to Penn and Columbia every year and their GPA is below their average, but strong DAT scores. They always come out top half of the class.
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Didn't matter to Columbia. The Facebook group has kids from many small and non-prestigious schools. I think DAT, GPA, and EC are king. I really don't think school prestige helps that much. Now, I agree with you that important connections can be made at prestigious schools but not having them won't stop one from getting into a dental school. IMO
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I went to a relatively "no-name" CSU campus and received 10 interviews and acceptances to a number of "prestigious" schools including UCSF, Michigan, UPenn, USC, and where I'm attending, UCLA. There are many others on this forum that can say similar things about themselves....Your undergrad school won't hold you back in the slightest if the rest of your application is strong.
i am a senior too and i got accepted ti UCR and UCI and CSUB i call many dental school in California and outside the state. All the schools in california told me that the GPA DAT EC's and other activities outside of dental field will got you into dental school not the name of undergraduate
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In response to the fact that it doesn't matter to Columbia. Yes, of course GPA and DAT all matter the most. If you kill those, you will go to a good school. I, however, feel that you are given certain leeway for doing well at a school with a strong science department.
Hear me out, most people who aren't at top 10 schools don't consider the following facts. Above all, the amount of students applying to dental school from top 10 schools is a very very small pool of students. It is extremely poor reasoning/logic to say that because you do not see an oversaturation of top 10 school students at a particular school, they do not care about prestige. There are may factors to consider such as number of predents, confounding factors, etc.
Where I go to school, there are 400 premed a year vs a measly 20-30 predents and I know at least 8-10 of those students are going to ivy dental schools. 33%-50% of your applicants per year is a massive rate to be sending to these schools. This is the average per year. If you look at your no name school, how many students are attending competitive dental schools per year? per 5 year on average? Now, the answer changes because you are looking on a greater time interval. Too many conclusions have been made on poor sampling.
Expanding your parameters to just schools that are hard to get into, this rate goes much much higher. So many students are going into business nowadays from top 10 schools. Most students are going into other professions and could care less about dentistry. I'm on the board of my school's predental society and we barely have over 60-70 members because most join by junior year. (sure a small group are not participating as well).
From reading years of threads on this topic, the ONE factor everyone fails to recognize is that VERY VERY few people at top 10 schools choose to go to dental school relative to other career paths - this is why you do not see an oversaturation of top 10 schools in the best schools unlike Business, law, science grad,and less so med but still true that they derive much of their base from top schools. Lets make the assumption that other top 10 schools follow the trend at my school and keep in my mind my school is bigger than most others. 30 predents a year-->300 applicants per year. How can you make any conclusions on prestige when 300 applicants from 10 schools over 12,000 applicants per year. You are looking at merely less than 3% of the applicant pool. and this is an even smaller number of the number of graduates from top 10 schools a year which number greater than 50,000!
Keep in mind this is a very simple approximation to show how small the pool of applicants is - there can be many other factors that affect this number. This is why you see very few students from top schools at top dental schools. It is not logical to simply conclude prestige does not matter. In fact, the process is so subjective that there is no way you can keep prestige out objectively. If you are already questioning this, then you have your answer. Subjectively, a person from a top 10 school will look better with the same stats than someone from a no name school.
The one caveat I have is that if you are at a top 10 school, there is already a higher probability that you are a good student and have good work ethic to enter these schools - which can be a confounding factor. In essence, you can make a more general conclusion that going to these schools might lead to acceptance to a more competitive dental school because you are a hard worker, intelligent, and have done well on tests. I can honestly tell you that the average DAT score of applicants from my school is somewhere 22+.
Hear me out, most people who aren't at top 10 schools don't consider the following facts. Above all, the amount of students applying to dental school from top 10 schools is a very very small pool of students. It is extremely poor reasoning/logic to say that because you do not see an oversaturation of top 10 school students at a particular school, they do not care about prestige. There are may factors to consider such as number of predents, confounding factors, etc.
Where I go to school, there are 400 premed a year vs a measly 20-30 predents and I know at least 8-10 of those students are going to ivy dental schools. 33%-50% of your applicants per year is a massive rate to be sending to these schools. This is the average per year. If you look at your no name school, how many students are attending competitive dental schools per year? per 5 year on average? Now, the answer changes because you are looking on a greater time interval. Too many conclusions have been made on poor sampling.
Expanding your parameters to just schools that are hard to get into, this rate goes much much higher. So many students are going into business nowadays from top 10 schools. Most students are going into other professions and could care less about dentistry. I'm on the board of my school's predental society and we barely have over 60-70 members because most join by junior year. (sure a small group are not participating as well).
From reading years of threads on this topic, the ONE factor everyone fails to recognize is that VERY VERY few people at top 10 schools choose to go to dental school relative to other career paths - this is why you do not see an oversaturation of top 10 schools in the best schools unlike Business, law, science grad,and less so med but still true that they derive much of their base from top schools. Lets make the assumption that other top 10 schools follow the trend at my school and keep in my mind my school is bigger than most others. 30 predents a year-->300 applicants per year. How can you make any conclusions on prestige when 300 applicants from 10 schools over 12,000 applicants per year. You are looking at merely less than 3% of the applicant pool. and this is an even smaller number of the number of graduates from top 10 schools a year which number greater than 50,000!
Keep in mind this is a very simple approximation to show how small the pool of applicants is - there can be many other factors that affect this number. This is why you see very few students from top schools at top dental schools. It is not logical to simply conclude prestige does not matter. In fact, the process is so subjective that there is no way you can keep prestige out objectively. If you are already questioning this, then you have your answer. Subjectively, a person from a top 10 school will look better with the same stats than someone from a no name school.
The one caveat I have is that if you are at a top 10 school, there is already a higher probability that you are a good student and have good work ethic to enter these schools - which can be a confounding factor. In essence, you can make a more general conclusion that going to these schools might lead to acceptance to a more competitive dental school because you are a hard worker, intelligent, and have done well on tests. I can honestly tell you that the average DAT score of applicants from my school is somewhere 22+.
