Dentist General Steps

Video Transcript

"Well, the steps are just being when you are in K through 12 just paying attention to your science, your mathematics, engineering, if you take engineering courses; and materials courses, too, if you are in woodworking or something like that. That is very important too to understand how you are working with different materials. Then you get into, when you get to college, university level, then you've got to make a decision. A lot of universities offer a pre-dental or pre-medical curriculum. You choose pre-med or pre-dental and the curriculum is set up to make sure that you are well trained when it comes to taking the dental test which is called, geeze what's the name they call it these days, but it is a test you take before you go to dental school and then you have to take that test and pass it in order to be considered for dental school. Then they take a look at your whole situation, what you made back in the university levels, what you made in K through 12, what you made on your Dental Aptitude Test or the DATs, as we used to call them. If you look good you get invited for an interview. Then once you go in for the interview you may or may not be selected to go into your class. There were 2,000 applications the year I went in and 600 interviews after the filtering down of the 2,000 and 100 made it. So it was a 100 to 2,000 ratio so you had to do well starting way back in high school and mainly in the university level so it is a filtering process. You have to choose ahead. Now a lot of people go into other fields. Say for instance engineering, laboratory work where they are a laboratory technician and then they decide that they want to go ahead and go to dental school but they still have to make sure that they have the course from the university level that are required to become that. So sometimes they have to go back to the university level and get some new courses in."