Dental What are my application weaknesses?

[artist2022]

Greetings,

I have just recently received a rejection from dental school. As most have received interviews and acceptances already by this point, I was not expecting to get in this cycle but it definitely stings to say the least. With only one school left that hasn't rejected (officially) my application, I am not holding my breath to wait and see if I get into this program. Instead, I am seeking advice with regards to my application to dental school.

To begin, I am a non-traditional student at this point as I am turning 30 this year. My GPA throughout college has not been anything fantastic. My Bachelors is in Cellular/Molecular Biology and my Masters is in Medical Sciences. My GPA information is as follows:

Total Undergraduate with +/- : 3.21
Total Graduate with +/- : 2.87

My graduate GPA is especially low due to having to work in addition to taking a full course load and completely underestimating the difficulty this would bring.

My DAT Scores were not completely terrible, but could likely use improvement. I unfortunately had to completely guess on a large number of questions in the Quantitative Reasoning and Perceptual ability portions of the exam because I did not gauge my time properly. My DAT breakdown is:

• Academic Average: 21
• Perceptual Ability: 19
• Quantitative Reasoning: 18
• Reading Comprehension: 25
• Biology: 21
• General Chemistry: 20
• Organic Chemistry: 21
• Total Science: 21

For extra curricular activities on my application I have:

• 260 Hours Volunteer/Observe at a Dental Clinic
• 430 Hours Research during my Masters Program
• 210 Hours Volunteer at a Medical Clinic

I am currently just at a loss as to what to do. In my rejection email, it states that I should most definitely improve my application if I plan on reapplying. Any advice would be infinitely appreciated!

Thanks,
Toad

BIGGEST red flag is your Master's GPA. Your undergrad GPA was low but not too terrible, and doing a Master's should have shown you can handle rigorous coursework but that showed the opposite, even if you were working. Have you already completed your Masters? If so, then I would maybe look into a 2nd Masters ? But that's another cost on its own and may not even be worth it.

21 on your DAT isn't too bad, but if you bumped that up to a 24+, I think that could really help because the DAT is an equalizer. Schools grade differently and some schools are harder than others, and that's why dental schools use the DAT as an equalizer. To schools, an applicant with a low GPA and a high DAT is a student that knows the material but went to a difficult school that brought their GPA down. Right now, I don't believe your DAT is high enough to show this, and that's why you may not have heard anything this cycle.

How many schools did you apply to? It doesn't sound like too many.

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[TanMan]

My first question would be: Which schools did you apply to? This is probably a controversial statement, but some schools have more loose admissions criteria than others. I remember NYU, BU, Howard, USC, and some others are relatively easy to get into. However, you should probably review all the dental schools to see which ones do have not have a hard cap on gpa. If you can raise your gpa, that would be ideal. If you have publications, then maybe packaging yourself as someone who wants to do a DDS/PhD program or go into the academic aspect of dentistry would increase your chances of getting into a dental school that is focused on research.

The main problem is your sub 3.0 gpa in grad school. If there was any way to expunge that out of your records and dental school application, that could be another solution.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

The fatal flaw is definitely your decision to work while going through your master's program. I know a lot of postbac directors who flat-out say that you need to treat your postbac or master's curriculum like a full-time job. It won't be any different when you get into dental school, and many people who I know who have tried to juggle a full-time job with dental school quickly determined this wasn't the way to stay in school. This may be something that you will need to work very closely with your master's program director to figure out what next to do. A lot of programs I know have a strong GPA preference/cutoff for master's/postbac coursework, and being sub-3.0 is not going to make the mark.