4 Lessons Learned From Interviewing Dental School Applicants

In the past few weeks, the admissions process for dental schools has been heating up with applicants starting to get invitations for interviews, or for many applicants, NOT getting invitations for interviews. I had the opportunity to conduct mock interviews with applicants from my alma mater a couple of weeks ago in order to help get them ready for the interview process. Knowing what I know now as a practicing dentist, I'd bet as an applicant I was someone who knew an infinitesimal amount about dentistry pretending to know what he was talking about. Here are some tips if you are going through the application process (or if someone you know is going through it):

1. Always emphasize the positive
2. Be humble, hungry, and smart
3. Resilience is the single-most important quality to display
4. Ask for help before you apply, or interview, or begin dental school

Lesson 1 - Always Emphasize the Positive

One thing an experienced interviewer can do without too much difficulty if they want to is pinpoint a weakness of yours and then twist the vice to make you squirm. This can become extremely uncomfortable and lead to a downward spiral if you don't address this with finesse. The easiest way to finesse this is to emphasize the positive in a bad situation. You want your interviewer to come away with an overall positive feeling about you, so emphasize the positive every chance you get:

Interviewer: "I saw you got a C in genetics, do you not think that this is an important subject to do well in as a medical professional?"

Student: "Yes, I got a C because the first few assignments in the class I actually failed because I didn't appreciate the depth to which I would have to know the subject. It was a hard lesson, but I got progressively better grades as the class went on the more I understood the degree to which I needed to master the material and internalize it. I learned more on the subject of how to study in this class than I did in the previous classes I got A's in."

This is an infinitely better answer than:

Student: "I did get a C but my professor was out on medical leave for the first half of the semester so I had an adjunct professor who hadn't ever taught on the college level before. They expected us to know everything about genetics from the beginning it seemed like and treated us like we were grad students who had already taken the course before."

Take responsibility for your actions, it's ok for things not to work out perfectly if you are better for it! Emphasize that aspect, that you are better for what you've been through. That's the way to get out of the vice.

Lesson 2 - Be Humble, Hungry, and Smart

This is from Patrick Lencioni and the advice he gives on hiring the right people. This works for interviews in general though because the best interviewers hire (and admit to dental school) for personality and not for abilities. I can't tell you how many prospective dental students think that because they volunteered for a few months in a dental clinic or shadowed a dentist for 250 hours, they are somehow qualified enough to say that they'd be able to "use their hand skills" to "bring smiles to people who have never smiled before." You don't know that, and you wouldn't know that until you actually tried to do the procedure on a person after countless hours of practice on models and mannequins and typodonts. It doesn't make you less qualified as a prospective dental student to admit that your knowledge is limited, but what you've seen you enjoy (humble). It brings a lot of positive energy to an interview when you say that you work hard at challenging things because you want to constantly grow as a person and as a professional (hungry). Make it clear that you've thought about things, about the tough questions, about the person you need to become to get to where you want to go, a thoughtful person may lack knowledge but has no limit to the knowledge they may obtain (smart). Adopt these qualities to the point that they are apparent in everything you say. 

Lesson 3 - Resilience is the single, most important quality to have

You may get asked a question that is not PC to ask, or that may make you uncomfortable. Often that is the point of the interviewer asking the question - to intentionally make you uncomfortable and see what you do with that. Do you clam up? Do you become aggressive or defensive? Do you have to protect your bruised ego? What we're looking for is someone who can glean the useful nuggets out of the situation, who can at once understand why the question is being asked and in the same moment also respond with grace and resilience. We have to during our training go through rounds regularly where we get raked over the coals if we don't know or didn't study enough about some rare genetic disorder or have the list of most common bacterial causes of fascial space infections memorized. The secret is no one knows everything all the time, but you are expected to come back to work the next day better-prepared. That's resilience, dealing with a verbal assault from one patient and delivering excellence just the same to the very next patient. You have to be able to bounce back.

Lesson 4 - Ask for Help as much as you can to prepare for each phase of the process

Learn to ask for constructive criticism and accept the critique gracefully. We're all amateurs in one thing or another, but you can get better when someone holds a mirror up to you and you don't turn away. Instead, take it all in and absorb what will help you to improve. Get coaching for the areas you're weak in. Have multiple people read your personal statement and write what they think about it. Have someone conduct a mock interview with you and record it, watch it back, and then do it again. Find a Dental School Admissions Coach to hold you accountable.

Thanks for reading, best of luck to you. 

-DOF