Dental Specializing a few years after graduating dental school.

[Cold Front]

If you decide to practice as a general dentist after dental school but then feel like specializing a few years down the line, do your grades and class rank matter as much as they would had you applied right after graduating dental school? Or, is the criteria a little different? I don't really want to specialize right away, but just want to know my options should I feel like specializing.

It depends on the specialty. Based on friends and former classmates who applied to endodontics and pediatric dentistry after 5 years of general dentistry experience, the criteria would be different. For those specialties, the more general dentistry experience in the real world, the more emphasis those years were given for consideration over just 4 years of dental school with good grades.

Orthodontics and Oral surgery mainly rely on strong academic creditentials, as they are the most competitive specialties to get in. So any level of general dentistry experience in the real world would not increase your odds much as they would in let’s say in endodontics and pediatric dentistry.

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[2TH MVR]

I'll echo what @Cold Front posted regarding ortho and OS. Again ... there are always exceptions. My ortho residency accepted 4 residents. One was a pediatric dentist who practiced for a few years. Another was a general dentist who also practiced a few years before ortho residency. Of course this was 26 years ago. My residency program was a stipend paying hospital based program. Probably some differences between the hospital vs. traditional residency programs.

 

[setdoc7]

Several years of GP work will not make up for a low class rank or GPA, no matter what specialty you chose to pursue. It will also be more difficult to find LOR's especially from dental school faculty. For example, a LOR from the chairman of Pedo holds more credibility than one from a local pediatric dentist. With that said, I have seen it happen, but your application must be strong.