Colton BrownSenior BIOSC major and soon-to-be student at Pitt Dental It's almost that time of year: application season!
Applying to dental schools can be daunting; however, you can knock out parts of the application early to lessen the stress come June. The entire application is completed online through the ADEA AADSAS portal. In mid-May, the application portal has a “soft opening” where applicants can begin to fill out the specific sections, but the applications cannot be submitted until June 1st. All schools require applicants to use the ADEA portal. In addition, some schools may have supplemental short answer or essay questions that they will send via email following the submission of your application. As you may already know, applications to any graduate school can be costly. Through the portal, the first school you apply to costs $251, and every school that follows costs $108. Most schools will contact you via email following your submission requesting an additional application fee through their own process. These fees typically range from $50-$150. Depending on your GPA, DAT score, and extracurriculars, most people apply to 8-12 dental schools. If you have not done so already, it is important to have a plan in place to cover these costs as they can quickly add up to a few thousand dollars. The first part of the application is the “Personal Information” section. This section includes demographic, citizenship, parental/guardian, and race/ethnicity information. Following this section is the “Academic History” portion. Here, you will enter information about your DAT scores, high school, and the transcripts/coursework from each college or university that you attended. Acquiring these transcripts takes time because you must send a transcript from any collegiate level school that you took a course through (even in high school). You must acquire a form from your application portal once it opens, and this must be mailed to each school. For Pitt, I walked to Thackeray Hall (can order online) with the printed form to save time. Once the schools receive this form, they must follow the instructions to mail your transcripts to the application company. Personally, I recommend doing this immediately when the application opens because it takes a little over a week for ADEA to receive and verify your coursework from each school. Unfortunately, you have to manually enter in your grades for each course on the application portal, and this is what they verify against the actual transcripts they receive. Although the “Personal Information” and “Academic History” sections are tedious, they do not require much effort. The “Supporting Information” section is where you get to brag about all of your extracurriculars. This is where you will list any dental-related experience/shadowing, volunteering, and work experience. Within the experiences portion, you provide a short description of each item as well as the number of hours you participated in the activity. Furthermore, there are sections for achievements and licenses where you list things such as scholarships, Dean’s List, or a Dental Assistant Certification. Do not be discouraged if you do not have a lot of accolades for these subsections. Another subsection is the evaluations, which are your letters of recommendation. You are allowed to have 4 evaluations attached to your application, which each letter writer can link through an email that you send them from the portal. Depending on each school, the required credentials for letter writers can vary. I suggest obtaining letters from 2 professors who are each from a different science department, 1 dentist, and 1 individual who can portray your leadership and other skills such as a research advisor or mentor. This combination will allow you to apply to a majority of the dental schools; however, you should check the requirements of each school to which you plan to apply. Approach your letter writers early, and inform them that the letter is due in mid-May so that even if they are a few days late with your letter, it will not hurt you when you actually apply on June 1st. The final subsection of “Supporting Information” is the personal statement. With a limit of 4500 characters, the statement is approximately 1 full page of text. The main theme of the purpose statement is “Why Dentistry?” I would suggest starting this before the application cycle approaches and having multiple people edit the statement. In my opinion, this is the most time-consuming piece of the dental school application. The fourth and final section is the “Program Materials” section. Each school can have questions unique to their program within this section. These may include short answer questions or simple demographic questions to determine if you have any prior connections to their school. Oftentimes, you can find the pre-requisite courses for these schools and a brief overview of each school within this section. All in all, If you take anything from this blog post, please take this important piece of advice: APPLY EARLY! I cannot stress this enough. Each day/week that passes makes a significant difference. If you have any questions about the application process or being a Pre-Dent, come pleas shoot me an email! Below is a link to the applications! https://aadsas.liaisoncas.com/applicant-ux/#/login
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