Dental Careers in New South Wales, how difficult is it? (1 Viewer)

[Ryan_T90]

Hi,

I am currently in Year 11 and lately I have been weighing up my career options and looking at what I may want to do in the future. A Dental career has fascinated me.

I am sure that in New South Wales to get into B. Dental Surgery you need to have completed a bachelor degree in any discipline. After that, a GAMSAT exam and an interview, is this a tough process? Is it quite competetive?

As you need a previous bachelor degree, I would be looking at B. Oral Health, would that be best suited if I want a career in Dentistry? Would it give me that edge over other applicants to B. Dental Surgery?

Thanks

 

[anfonnee]

Entry into the USYD BDent degree is pretty competitive. There aren't too many spots each year and there's quite a few applicants (can't remember exact figures, but i would say probably around 50-60 spots each year based on other dental schools). The competition is made harder by the fact that you get assessed on your uni results from your undergrad course, your gamsat AND your interview. You may get the most awesome marks in uni but if you flunk the gamsat you can't even get an interview. Or you may do awesome in uni AND gamsat but mess up the interview cos you're nervous. So yeah put simply, you're gonna have to work pretty hard to get into dentistry.

As for the Bachelor of Oral Health, many (but not all) people would agree that it honestly gives you no advantage in applying for dentistry and if anything, it might make things harder. This is because you need get decent marks in your undergrad course and BOH subjects aren't THAT easy to do well in (say compared to a science degree). On top of this, you probably want to do a course that you'd be happy to make a career out of, if worst case scenario, you don't make it into dentistry. At least then you won't have wasted 3 years on a degree you didn't even like (doing a course you like also means you're more likely to do well in it).
That being said, a career as an oral health therapist/hygenist does have its perks and might actually appeal to you although you really should research into what the profession entails. (you can message me if you're still interested)

So with that, you can do any degree first whether it be oral health or science or something completely unrelated like commerce or engineering.

One piece of advice though: consider applying for an undergraduate dentistry course interstate. There's schools in Brisbane, Gold Coast, Townsville, Adelaide, Bendigo (VIC) which all offer dentistry at an undergrad level and you might find taht it suits you more.

If you got any more queries about dentistry, feel free to leave a message.

 

[glache]

I believe CSU Wagga have opened up a dent course?

Re: USYD, I would proceed with caution. My friend does dent there and she says it's really, really disorganised, e.g. the first 2 years, they make them do all the med subjects on top of their dent subjects, so they're learning, and being examined on, stuff that isn't relevant. They used to have a dent-specific med subject (so like medicine of the head and neck only) but they abolished it :s The pracs are also really disorganised--for example, they were meant to get a set of extracted teeth in time for start of this sem, but they only told them 2 weeks before, instead of at the start of the summer hols. And by extracted teeth I mean they were expected to visit dental surgeries and ask if there were any extracted teeth lying around that the dentist was happy to give them!

Also, USYD is the only Australian uni to award Bachelor of Dental Science, meaning that the only countries they can practice in are NZ and maybe Canada. All other unis are either Masters or Doctors. Though I will say that my friend's in 3rd year, and they just had a new Dean come in last year who seems to be trying to change all this, so do try talking to current students in younger years (if you know any) and see what they think.

Also for the entry requirements, they've recently changed. GAMSAT + GPA used to be barrier, so once you got an interview, you were 100% assessed on interview. Now I believe it's GPA barrier, and GAMSAT 2/3 and interview 1/3.