Dentist Qualifications

Video Transcript

"Dentists take a lot of different kinds of impressions and molds of the teeth so we use what are called impressions trays. Typically to become a dentist, dentist is kind of the same career path as a physician. Basically what you have to do is you do have to go to college and probably some sort of college degree. For example like a bachelors degree. Most doctoral programs such as dentistry or medicine require that you get a bachelors degree prior to going into doctorates school. So typically the career path after high school would be going to college pursuing some sort of undergraduate degree such as biology or chemistry. It's once you get to that you obtain the degree then you have to go to apply to doctorates school. And there's a couple of requirements that are necessary to get in such as having a degree, taking an admissions test to make sure that you qualify, certainly, you know, making sure that you get some sort of experience and exposure to dentistry. Then it's an issue of just trying to get in for an interview and interviewing for the doctorate program. There are a lot of prerequisites that you have to complete regardless if your degree is accounting or basket weaving or biology. There are a lot of prerequisites that are required in order to get that. And what I mean by that is you can be an accountant or something with business and still get in to dental school but these prerequisites are basically a set of courses that have minimum requirements to get into dental school. So for example there's some several core courses in biology and chemistry, physics. Things like that would be required regardless of your degree to get in to the program. It's often recommended that you pursue a science based career path such as a biology or chemistry. Because not only does it fulfill the prerequisites that the dental school will require but beyond that it gives you additional training in the courses that you would receive in you doctorate training anyhow. Work experience as far as going to dental school is more or less getting some exposure. Most students that entered dental school have a little exposure and the ones that do are because they had some sort of relative in the field and gave them exposure, but most, most dental students you know basically were involved with some extern ship experience where they kind of sat in a clinic, interacted with the dentist kind of observe the practices of the experience. And that's basically the experience you need to get in. Much like other jobs you need to have really good interactive skills, you have to be very personable. You need to be someone that's a very good listener which to me is one of the most important things of a dentist is a good listener. So being a good listener, being able to interact, and ask questions, being able to explain things in a way that doesn't present as you know condescending or hard to understand difficult, certainly being a compassionate person trying to understand each person as a different situation whether it be from a financial standpoint or even from a dental standpoint so being a compassionate person, certainly you know being able to explain things in an extremely easy manner to understand and certainly being able to just interact with someone. Depending on the situation you know a dentist could obviously just work on growing the practice but you know they could go into a specialty since a lot of dentist will practice general dentistry and then want to pursue a specialty such as oral surgery or orthodontics. So that's one career path is basically to kind of go into an extra specialty as a branch off of dentistry and certainly they can go into research situations or work at a university, perhaps be like a mentor instructor at a dental school or kind of get involved with research opportunities. Some dentists actually choose to work closely with insurance companies to try and help delegate new ways and making sure that people get access to dental care. Other people will also go into product sales, selling the new latest and greatest improvements for technological advancements in dentistry."