-: Well, you don't have to do science to be a dentist.
My dental partner is actually a psychology major.
In the interview process of going into any dental school,
they'll ask you, "have you spent time in a dental office?"
and being able to say yes and that you've shadowed
is absolutely wonderful.
But you have to have a strong GPA,
because it is so competitive these days.
Medical school, they're losing a lot of their students
to dentistry, because everybody wants the 8:00-5:00,
don't be on call.
So it's highly competitive.
And then you also have to take what's called
the Dental Aptitude Test, which is the DAT.
It's like the MCAT for dentistry.
So you have to do very well in that as well.
You can open a dental office right
when you graduate from dental school,
but you probably have a lot of debt,
so the banks may not be forthcoming with money.
So it's good to kind of go in as an associate,
so you kind of get your feet wet,
and you see how dentistry is done in real life settings.
Because being in a university setting is not real life.
So, you can come out and be an associate,
there is private practice associate-ships,
and then there's also corporate associate-ships.
And so, they kind of mandate how you do dentistry sometimes.
I think you have to have a really good personality
along with being really good with your hands,
because half the battle of dentistry
is communicating with the patient, exactly what they want.
So doing good dentistry is all very key,
but you also have to be able to build a relationship
with your patients as well.