Arts-Dentistry Program: Insights from a Pre-Dent

Pre-dental Journey:

During Allison’s senior year of high school, she realized that dentistry was the right field for her based on her work experience with a local dentist in her community. At the start of college, Allison patterned her family’s footsteps by pursuing a Bioengineering major and involving herself in engineering clubs and bioengineering research. She desires to one day apply her bioengineering and entrepeneurial background to innovate new dental technologies, or in her words the “next invisalign.” Very impressive!

During her freshman year of college, she learned about the University of Maryland’s three-year Arts-Dentistry Program which was unique in that it would provide her the opportunity to apply to the University of Maryland School of Dentistry one year early. She decided to go for it! Looking back, Allison emphasizes the importance of knowing about the program early on as she had to map out a plan to ensure the completion of her prerequisites and the DAT. A reluctance that Allison had while applying for the program was that upon accepting a spot she would be unable to complete her Bioengineering degree. She decided that she was ready to delve into the dental school world, because she believed that all the knowledge she acquired from her Bioengineering major up to that period provided her with a strong foundation.

In completing the University of Maryland Dental School application, Allison started the process of writing her personal statement by brainstorming things that she thought were unique about her and asking the dentist that initially inspired her what they wrote about. Her approach in writing also involved “finding those little anecdotal stories” that support the list of things you thought might make you different than others, adding that you should “harp on what you’re really passionate about.” In her personal statement, she talked about leadership and giving back to the community as a future dentist. Allison greatly appreciated the support that the dentist she worked for gave her through the application process. If you are fortunate to have a mentor (professor, dentist, employer, volunteer coordinator), reaching out to them to review your application or give you any tips that might have is a great way to gauge whether your personal statement authentically reflects your personality. Although Allison advises getting as much feedback as possible for your personal statement, she emphasizes that you should maintain your own original copy somewhere because “everybody has their own thoughts on what makes a good one” but at the end of the day the personal statement should be yours so you don’t have to accept every piece of feedback you receive. 

Dental School Journey:

Jumping into the topic of studying in dental school, Allison shares that she goes through her lecture slides ahead of time, takes notes on her iPad, and rewatches the recorded lectures to help her prepare for exams. In her experience, there are 50 to 60 slides on average for each slide deck,  12 slide decks per exam, and anywhere from one to three exams per week. She attends lecture between the hours of 8am and 5pm, and then continues studying the lectures after school. Allison acknowledges that the constant studying and exams “definitely gets difficult, but sometimes you find patterns in the lectures and once you start taking an exam in a class, you can see like what the professor focuses on” which makes everything more manageable over time.

Outside of didactic lecture, Allison describes how great it is to work with your hands in pre-clinic because it is the “first time you're really doing anything that has to do with what you want to do in the future.” Allison made teeth out of wax and mentioned that although it may not be something that you need to do every day in a clinical setting it enables you to get used to working with their hands. Some pre-dental students might find it comforting in that Allison “was not an artist” and “had never done something intricate” like sculpting a tooth prior to dental school. 

“Once I did it a couple of times, I feel like I get the procedure down and it becomes more natural. Right now we're doing endo, which includes root canals. The first one I did, oh my gosh, it was so bad. But then, the second one was so much better and you don't know how it gets so much better, but it magically does. So I think it just takes practice.”

Work-Life Balance 

During the second half of her second year, she will shifting towards completing more labs and less exams. Transitioning into the third year, Allison will begin seeing patients so she will not have nearly as many exams as she did as a D1 and D2, but she will still be taking classes (just not as many). Progressing into your fourth year, Allison foresees that she will rarely be in class and mostly be seeing patients. Allison recalls her initial challenge when starting her first year of dental school in the pandemic was the difficulty of meeting her classmates. 

“We had a really hard time as a whole class knowing what was acceptable, trying to make friends, yet trying to follow the rules of the pandemic and be caring health professionals.” 

As Allison  looks back at her study habits during COVID, she recognizes that she became burnt out very quickly because the lockdown made her prone to ‘overstudying,’ because there were no alternative activities. Moving forward, she  generally she tries to at least have one of the weekend days off. In terms of time management, Allison states it is all a learning experience and shares her wisdom that “it's important to put everything in perspective. Dental school can be whatever you make it.” With this in mind, she says that although achieving good grades and specializing are her ultimate goals, she still carves out time for socializing even If that just be taking a night off to watch a movie with her roomates. Still, sometimes there are time periods where you just have to keep studying and that is also ok. It is all about making the best of your time, which means recognizing “that sometimes it's more productive to have something to look forward to, to get yourself to study versus sitting there on your phone for 20 minutes and then studying for five hours and just dislking your life. I've been there too. I've definitely done both ends of it.”

Allison further shines light on how time for socializing and building meaningful friendships is a part of at University of Maryland School of Dental Medicine culture. “You are studying a lot, but it's still really fun. I loved college. I had a lot of good friends in college. I honestly think I like dental school more already, even with starting it during COVID and all of the studying involved. It's just the friendship. We have one hundred and thirty four people in our class and it's just like a big family. I feel like it's been really rewarding, at least this year, to get to know everybody on a more personal level, struggle together and then you're like, oh, let's all go to like downtown and have fun tonight. Everybody's just so excited to see each other. We went out after our exam on Friday and all my classmates were at the bar and it was just really cool seeing everybody. So I think that's what I like more about it then college.”

That’s all I have for today, everyone. Thank you for reading and I hope this gave you some inspiration for continuing your studying so that you can too one day be a student at UMSOD like Allison. Feel free to use the comments section below to tell us what more you would like to read about.

With care,

Gus

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