Dental School Interview Course

Dental school interviews are notoriously difficult but they don’t have to be – fortunately, a lot of interview questions are very common and almost always asked e.g. “Why dentistry?” or “Why this university?“.  Thus, the students that don’t get in, tend to be the ones that didn’t prepare adequately and were hoping to just ‘wing it’ on the day.

How the Dental school interview course will help

We will spend a significant part of the morning discussing and perfecting your answers to both these questions before moving onto other commonly asked questions like “Why not nursing?” or “Where do you see yourself in 10 years time?“. We will use these questions to introduce you to powerful strategies for approaching new interview questions that you haven’t encountered before. This will provide you with a solid framework from which to logically answer unexpected questions.

When it comes to medical ethics, most students usually fall into two categories: one who don’t bother preparing it and the other who read several medical ethics textbooks. Rather counter-intuitively, the second approach isn’t that much better than the first.

At your stage, you just need a simple and basic understanding of the ethical principles and be able to apply them to a variety of scenarios. We will show you several examples of how to tackle ethical scenarios using a fool-proof system to ensure you don’t miss any points or fall into any obvious traps set by the interviewer.

Situational questions are extremely common and chances are, you will be asked one at your interview e.g. Give me a situation when you showed good communication skills. Like the other type of questions asked at dental interviews – there is also a reliable framework that you can use to answer 90% of these questions, that we will teach you. Although some of these questions may appear quite challenging e.g. “What would you do if you found your consultant was smelling of alcohol in the morning?” they are actually very easy once you develop a logical method of approaching them.

How will you work on this?

You are likely to be given materials (texts, images, graphs, models) to examine and interpret in your interview. These aren’t designed to test knowledge but, instead, are a test of your ability to think laterally and generate novel ideas. Thus, your tutor will expose you to a variety of unknown materials so that you have a solid framework on how to approach them.

This is an invaluable opportunity to put everything that you’ve learned into practice. You get two individual mock interviews with different dental tutors. At the end of each mock interview, you are given detailed written and oral feedback along with suggestions for improvement.

An increasing number of dental schools are now using Multiple Mini-Interviews (MMIs). These type of interviews are not anything to be frightened of and if anything – more predictable than the traditional panel interviews. For example, you can guarantee that there will be a station assessing your commitment to dentistry and one assessing your awareness of medical ethics. This is your chance to get to experience a full MMI circuit – something no other company out there will do.