Lesson 21: The Dental School Application Process
Congratulations. You’ve decided to embark on probably one of the most expensive, time-consuming journeys of your life. The DAT, the personal statement, supporting materials, and the interview add together to what can often be a huge headache. Despite this, somehow, over 25,000 people enroll in dental school every year. This guide offers resources and approaches to help you maximize your chances that you’re one of the 25,000.
This guide helps you conceptualize the overall application while helping you consider how each application detail contributes to this conception. To grasp the application in all its complexity, we encourage you to think about the application as a whole. While this guide examines each application component, it also encourages you to consider these components together. No part of the application acts independently. As you build a personal narrative, each component builds upon the previous.
An admissions officer will read each section in relation to the others with two questions in mind. First, is this person qualified? And second, does this person truly want to become a dentist? Everything you write should be in the service of assuring the reader these things. In the process of writing, you may encounter self-doubt and insecurity. As with any life-altering decision, these misgivings are healthy and normal, so long as your enthusiasm outweighs your doubts most of the time.
In order to focus on the details, however, you should have a clear understanding of what the application looks like and how you can craft your application to answer the two major questions guiding your evaluation.
The application is a lengthy process. It’s for people who truly want to be doctors, who have thought about this for years, who have made sure to seek experiences that confirm their desires. This guide will complement the long, hard work of deciding to become a dentist. It will not replace the hours of contemplation and deep experiences you should undertake before considering applying. You must have already completed the required coursework in undergraduate and, at the very minimum, have completed at least 100 hours of shadowing members of the dental profession. However, to be competitive, you must have a compelling narrative that ties these interests and experiences together.
The AADSAS
The American Dental Education Association (ADEA) is the governing body that administers the Associated American Dental Schools Application Service (AADSAS), a unified application you submit to any American Dental School. The AADSAS is very similar to an undergraduate admissions application in that you submit your transcripts, test scores, letters of recommendation (up to four), activities and experiences, and a one-page personal statement.
The application differs, however, in what admissions officers seek. Because an undergraduate degree is a prerequisite for dental school, it’s tempting to think about the application in terms of the applications you wrote five or more years ago. Because of the large number of high schoolers applying to four-year colleges and universities, a huge industry has emerged around the gatekeeping of these institutions. From the large admissions offices to the test-prep and admissions consulting programs, these applications' audiences are slightly different from that of dental school applications.
Undergraduate admissions offices are large, complex operations. From marketing schools to providing tours to organizing daily info sessions, the undergraduate admissions office can be much more easily likened to an industrial operation. In any successful industrial operation, individuals from all knowledge bases and disciplines come together to provide valuable input on the process to sell more applications. (This allows schools to make more money on application fees while simultaneously making the school appear more competitive and ultimately increasing its rankings.)
Despite declining enrollment in the humanistic disciplines, undergraduate admissions committees are often disproportionately comprised of members from the humanities. This means that essays must be perfect—no comma splices, misspelled words, or banal metaphors. Given the immense competition, small errors are great reasons for undergraduate admissions counselors to disqualify you from the process. In undergraduate admissions, while content is important, form is too.
By contrast, the dental school admissions office is staffed mostly by practicing dentists and dental school students. The people whose main day-to-day writing activities include recording gum recession numbers or scrawling pain medications using pre-formulated medical shorthand are the same ones reading your application. While many of these people come with undergraduate majors as varied as art history or anthropology, many are far removed from those days.
Consequently, the form of the essays will not be scrutinized as if they were part of an undergraduate admissions application. The ambitious creative risks employed by overachieving prospective undergraduates—the essay about napkins in haiku form, the rap about the 1054 supernova observed by Chinese astronomers—are not going to necessarily shift the needle in the way they would for an undergraduate application.
Rather, vivid personal descriptions that highlight your motivations to become a dentist will increase the essays' effectiveness. Concise, cogent writing is key. What are the experiences that made you want to become a dentist? How did those experiences do that? Even the most boring experience can be the grounds for a good story, when told right.
This guide predominantly covers parts of the application where you have significant agency to craft during the application process. For other parts of the Dental School application, like standardized testing and interview prep, see the resources below.
Further Resources on Application Steps Not Covered by This Guide
DAT
https://www.ada.org/en/education-careers/dental-admission-test/dat-guide
https://www.kaptest.com/study/dat/what-is-the-dental-admission-test-dat/
Interviews
https://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/files/Sample_Dental_Interview_Questions_10_23_14.pdf
