Welcome to Dentistry 101.

My name is Aubrey Barra, I'm a third year

dental student, and with me today is Pattie Katcher, the Director of Admissions
here at the University of Michigan. Welcome Pattie. >> Thank You. >> So, today
we're just going to go
through a series of questions, okay? >> Sounds great. >> Perfect. So what is
critically important for a prospective student to know about
when they're applying to dental school? >> Probably the most important thing
is the timing of the application, and the application opens up in June
every year for all dental schools, not just Michigan, so
applying early is critically important. Getting the application in,
getting it complete, so that schools can move forward pretty
quickly with the review process. Part of the complete application
means also having your DAT taken at an appropriate time. So the June or July
timeframe is probably the best window of time to take the DAT
to coincide with the early application. The thing to keep in mind for our school,
and for most other dental schools too, is that there's a holistic review
process for dental school, meaning we're not just paying
attention to the test scores and grade point averages of students, but
we are also paying attention to many other things that are captured
on the application. So having a full and
complete application in a timely fashion, that's probably the critically
important piece. >> Okay, great. So, are the GPA and
DAT results the most important thing for a prospective student who's liooking
to apply to a dental school? >> Those two pieces are very important,
they're critically important, because dental schools are able
to use those to measure and predict success in dental school for a student to be
able to be academically
prepared for the rigors of dental school. So that's really important. Equally
important, are some of the other components
that are captured on an application, such as shadowing and experience in
the field, volunteer experiences, or work, or research kinds of experiences,
which allow us to make an assessment about who this individual
is as a person, where the GPA and the test scores allow us to assess how
they are as an academic individual. >> Right.
>> The other lets us evaluate those other components, and
when the two of those are very strong, that makes a very competitive applicant. >>
Okay, with regards to shadowing, how
many hours are required for an applicant? >> That's a great question. All schools
require some
kind of volunteering and shadowing experience within dentistry. Michigan has a
minimum requirement
of 100 hours of shadowing, dental shadowing specifically, but
all schools require some level of that. They may be more than that,
they may be less than that. We have our minimum set at 100,
which allows us to establish that a student has spent some committed
time in the field volunteering and shadowing at different offices. It does not have
to be a general dentist,
although we all dental schools encourage much of the shadowing to be done
with a general dentist, but it can also be supplemented with shadowing at
a community clinic or with a specialist. >> Okay, so what are the best
types of extracurricular or volunteer experiences for
an applicant to stand out against others? >> Because those components of
the application, as I mentioned before, are really important, and
we want to see strengths in those areas, we want to be able to be able to
understand that the students has great interpersonal skill building and
opportunities to expand on those kinds of communication skills and
people skills, right? Dentistry is part of health
professions in general. If you don't know how to
interact with individuals or speak to individuals,
it will make it very difficult, so jobs, of any sort,
not anything in particular. Shadowing experiences will
automatically kind of fill in that, and volunteer experiences, many students are
undergraduates before
they're applying to dental school, so seek out opportunities
within your school environment, a predental club or
another club that one is interested in. Clubs or activities that also provide
service activities to others, that's an important component,
because coming into dental with having an understanding about service is
very important, not just to Michigan, but every dental school is very interested
in that kind of background for a student. >> Awesome. So how do you determine who's
invited for
an interview, and then what are the interviews
like if you do get one? >> So we have an Admission's Committee. So I can speak
specifically
about Michigan right now. I don't know all of the details about
other schools interview process, but for Michigan,
we have a 13-member admission committee who reviews applications
on a rolling basis. So as applications become complete,
because individuals are applying early, and then they're complete,
they're reviewed by our committee and decisions are made of who
to invite to interview. So hopefully those other things that I was
just mentioning are very strong components of an application and that person will
hopefully get invited to an interview. We have ten interviews total, and at each
interview we invite 30 candidates
to appear for each interview date. Then the actual interview day is
comprised of a variety of things, but a large component of the day is what
we call MMI, multiple mini-interview, and that's a series of stations
that a student will rotate through speaking one on one with
different individuals from the school. Students, dental students,
all play part in that, I now you've played a role in
interviewing, we have faculty members, we have staff members, and admission
committee members all coming together during this one time to
interview candidates. So the series of stations mean a student
is progressing through each station and having a one on one interaction
with an interviewer. There are some other schools
that use MMI to some degree, but not in such large degree as
Michigan uses this process. >> All right, well thank you very
kindly for all your advice Pattie, and thank you for watching.