Interview Preparation Matters for Your Dental School Interviews

You’ve probably thought about it but weren’t sure if you needed it—interview preparation for your upcoming dental school interview. A lot of work, time, and money is necessary to prepare, so what’s the point when all you need to do is show up to your upcoming dental school interview and be yourself?

Isn’t it a bad idea to try to pretend to be someone you’re not anyway?

I wish it were that simple. Through many interviews myself over the years, I can comfortably say that the ones where I showed up and acted as myself were the ones that didn’t go very well. Instead, it was the ones where I diligently spent time practicing and increasing my knowledge about the program or company I was interviewing for to be an expert when I showed up to the interview; these are the interviews that I nailed!

Preparation Matters When It Comes to Interviews

Preparation matters in nearly all aspects of life to succeed. Why would it not matter for one of the most important events of your life: your dental school interview? Your upcoming interview may be the very thing the catapults you into the first day of the rest of your career as a dentist. If you succeed during your dental program interview, you’ll be able to start dental school and commence your training as a practitioner in one of the most fast-paced and rewarding medical careers out there. On the other hand, if you don’t impress during your interview, you either have to hope for better luck next time or face the fact that no school will accept you into their program and that you may need to start looking for another career.

There’s nothing wrong with being a dental assistant. It’s a great career in and of itself. However, most of the candidates I work with are highly ambitious and do not like to settle for the second-best.

Does the Dental School Interview Really Matter that Much?

“But I have on my pre-dental requirements completed, and I’ve taken the DAT. Won’t I eventually be admitted into a dental program?”

That all depends, of course, on you as a candidate. How good were your grades? How was your score on the DAT? And how does your application and Statement of Purpose read to potential dental schools? Sadly I’ve met many candidates with mediocre grades and test scores and with modest application documents. This combination usually doesn’t get most candidates very far. However, in the few cases where those candidates were invited for a dental school interview, their lack of preparation for their interview resulted in a pass, meaning no programs took them for that year. I’ve known some dental school applicants who just got so tired of the process year after year that we’re ready to give up on the process when I met with them. For a number of these candidates, dental school interview preparation was the missing link. Once they were willing to spend some time focusing on becoming incredible candidates for their upcoming interview, they finally started to get acceptances to the dental school programs.

For others, it was more about wanting to be accepted into the program of their choice. While less prestigious dental school programs were willing to accept them, they knew that an improvement in their interview skills would likely make the difference between them getting into their dream school and not.

What Does Interview Prep Entail?

“Okay, but what is there really to prepare for in an interview? I mean, we all know what an interview is. It sounds pretty straightforward to me.”

This is where a lot of candidates go wrong. They’re unwilling to learn the reasons behind why interview questions are asked and even the fundamentals of the interview process. It’s always interesting because people who want to become dentists are usually very meticulous and thoughtful. They understand that dental school will teach them what they need to know about oral biology, oral pathology, structures and materials of teeth, and the best methodologies and practices for dental treatments. They understand that dental school is more than just about getting a piece of paper that authorizes them to begin dental treatment on a patient. The parts of the paper (your dental degree and license) are just a few aspects of being a dentist— the important thing is to know enough about dentistry as a science and an art to treating a patient effectively. While most dental candidates understand the importance of dental school, many fail to see how learning the interview process’s ins-and-outs can help them succeed with getting into dental school.

You wouldn’t just “wing it” without the proper knowledge of dentistry and try to perform a complex restoration on a patient without the appropriate training. So why would you show up to your dental school interview thoroughly unprepared?

The candidates I tend to work with often come to me after failing at a few dental school interviews. They schedule their first appointment with me and begin to explain that they messed up during their last interview and how they’re not sure what they should have said instead. We work together to resolve those issues and strategize a better way to answer the same questions. But to be honest, I much would have preferred if they came to me before their first interview so that they wouldn’t have wasted that opportunity. You never know how many more chances you’re going to get.

If you’ve been considering signing up for dental school interview prep for your upcoming interview, I’d highly encourage you to do so. The truth is that most candidates don’t realize how bad they are coming across during their interviews until they have an interview expert give them that honest and direct feedback.

The good news is, you’ve come to the right place. At IDC, we’ve helped hundreds of dental applicants get into the dental school programs of their choice over the past five years. Our process is both simple yet very effective. We first teach you everything you need to know about how interviews work, from a bird’s eye view to the subtle details. Next, you practice one-on-one with one of our dental school interview experts and encourage you to make mistakes with us first before you go and make those mistakes in your real upcoming dental school interview. We strategize new and better responses for each dental interview question, tailoring it to the specific program wherever we can. Finally, we help you to polish your answers, improve your body language and tone, and ultimately master your interview skills until we’re all convinced that you’re ready to rock.

Our interview preparation system is called Interview Mastery, and it’s the most comprehensive and powerful interview preparation system out there for dental school candidates preparing for their upcoming interviews.

Learn more about Interview Mastery.