6th Week

Once again, I volunteered at the dental clinic this week. They still needed help organizing old patient files so I wrote down patient names and ID's. While I was working, there was a dentist who had a lot of downtime so he was sitting in the same room as me. Trying to avoid any awkward silence, I figured I might as well tell him that I want to go to dental school. I told him that I applied to dental schools during the summer and that I have been to 3 interviews: Houston, San Antonio, and LSU. He was very surprised that I had received interviews so early, and he assured me that with my grades and DAT score, I was going to be accepted somewhere. I explained to him that my Texas interviews were very relaxed and conversational, and that I definitely would love to be accepted to Houston, which was where he graduated from! Then I explained to him that my LSU interview was slightly more formal, and LSU required students to perform a Chalk-carving test to test our perceptual ability and manual dexterity. We were told we had to carve a piece of chalk in a certain way, with certain dimensions, and we would be graded on accuracy, smoothness, and how good our angles were. The dentist was definitely surprised that this was apart of the admissions process, but he explained that in his first year of dental school, students must create a tooth out of a block of wax. Thus, he assumed that LSU was preparing students for this process. I then told him that my brother owns a dental office in Conroe and that he is a graduate of NYU, which is the same school the dentist's daughter went to! I learned that this dentist volunteers every other Wednesday, and he told me he would love to talk to me as much as he could. I am very excited to continue to talk to him and hopefully learn more about dentistry.

Overall, it was just really great talking to someone about dental school and the admissions process. With the first round of acceptances coming out December 1st, I am getting pretty nervous. I can't believe that in less than 2 months, I will know if I am one step closer to reaching my goal. I know that if I don't get my acceptance on December 1st, it doesn't mean I should lose hope, it just simply means I'll just have to wait in suspense a little bit longer! In the meantime, I know I just need to focus on maintaining my grades and try to enjoy my last year at UST as much as possible as well as continue waiting for anymore interviews!