Peter RittenhouseBIOSC Senior & pre-dental student Hey everyone! My name is Peter Rittenhouse and I am a senior at the University of Pittsburgh. This year has definitely been stressful and testing for all of us, but I received a good bit of news in my acceptance to dental school! This moment was followed by immediate happiness, then quickly with the thought of how will I be paying for this? Graduate school tuition is something that can be extremely daunting and the thought of taking out loans may be something that scares you. I too felt this way. This led me to search for ways to reduce the cost of tuition. Today, I wanted to talk about a scholarship I am applying to through the United States Navy. The official title of the scholarship is the Health Professions Scholarship Program (HPSP). It is a full tuition scholarship that also covers cost of supplies, textbooks, and gives you a generous stipend each month for living/housing costs. The scholarship also gives a signing bonus of upwards of twenty thousand dollars. This tremendous deal does come with some conditions. All the time spent in school must be re-payed in the form of service. In other words, your four years at school must in turn become four years as a Navy dentist or doctor at one of their military bases in the United States or abroad. This scholarship provides the recipient with a lot of very cool opportunities such as the ability to travel around the world. This is something that otherwise would be very unlikely for someone pursuing dentistry or medicine. Similarly, it offers a slightly competitive salary without the startup costs of your own practice. It is a very interesting offer. That being said, as you could imagine it is extremely competitive. It is open to all pre-med, pre-dental, pre-optometry, etc. students in the United States who are competing for a limited number of spots. I want to spend the rest of this blog post laying out the process of applying to the scholarship. To begin, you want to get in contact with a recruiter. The Army and Air Force offer nearly the exact same scholarship so you’ll want to do some research and decide which branch is right for you. The recruiter will send you a lot of outdated paperwork that you must fill out as soon as possible. None of the paperwork is especially hard and it shouldn’t take too much time. Any questions can be directed to your recruiter and mine was very helpful. After the paperwork, you will be scheduled for Military Entrance Processing (MEPS). This is a full day of physicals, eye and ear testing, blood tests, and more paperwork. This is to ensure that you meet the qualifications to be enlisted in whatever branch of service you decide is best for you. After MEPS, you will have two interviews with military officers who went through the same process. They generally will ask the same questions during both interviews. Some examples are: Why Dentistry? Why the Navy? How are you a leader? The interview is mainly to see who you are outside of your resume. Then that’s it. You have successfully applied. The time after is just waiting to hear back - that is where I am right now. I am not expecting to get this scholarship. As I said it is extremely competitive. This year especially due to COVID they are offering fewer scholarships than normal. I am very proud that I tried for the scholarship, and truly believe it was a great experience. If you have any questions about the scholarship or my pre-dental journey feel free to reach out or attend my office hours Wednesdays from 12-1.
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January 2022
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