HSDM Advanced Standing for International Dentists Track Webinar

And it looks like everyone has had the opportunity to join, so we will go ahead and get started. Thank you all so much for joining us. This is the informational webinar for the Advanced Standing for International Dentists Track, Harvard School of Dental Medicine.

A quick run through of what we're going to look at today. We're going to start by introducing ourselves. So you'll get to know the folks that are being on the panel with you today. We'll talk a little bit about HSDM as a school. Take a look at the curriculum and what is offered to advanced standing students. And then we'll spend some time going over the admissions process and admissions requirements. But the heart of the session will be a Q&A with us and with some students that are current advanced standing students at the end of the session.

So a quick round of introductions for the three of us. My name is Maddy Watts. I am the coordinator for the ASID program, so I will be communicating with you throughout your admissions process and doing the handoff for folks who join us as ASID students from the admissions process to the registrar to get you enrolled. And I'll pass it over to Sarah.

OK. Hi, everybody. Welcome thanks so much for joining us tonight. My name is Sarah Troy-Petrakos. I'm the director of admissions. We're really happy to have you. And I'll pass it to Luis.

Hi, I'm Luis Lopez. I am a society director for Castle Society. And before I get into the curriculum, I'll explain a little bit more of what I-- the role of a society director is at Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Thank you.

Awesome. All right, so a little bit more information about what the ASID track is at HSDM. This is a track within our DMD program that enables internationally-trained dentists to earn a Doctor of Dental Medicine degree in the United States. So it will make you eligible for licensure to practice in the US. And it is an amazing opportunity to learn alongside our four-year DMD students and really grow your skills as a clinician. So you would be joining HSDM in January of year 2 for our DMD program and completing 2 and 1/2 years at HSDM as a student.

A little bit more about HSDM and why it might be a great choice for you is that, again, that you would be getting to experience a fully integrated curriculum with our DMD students, so you'll have a lot of the same-- or you will have the same opportunities from year 2 all the way through. You'll experience HSDM's very unique case-based learning model, which is very unique to what we do at both Harvard Medical School and at Harvard School of Dental Medicine. And you'll get to experience all the same clinical training that our DMD students experience. You'll also get to benefit from really small class sizes. So there's a lot of opportunities for personalized mentorship and lots of hands-on support. And you'll get to grow in a curriculum that's very focused on oral and systemic health.

Another great benefit of HSDM is our location. We are located on the Longwood Medical campus in Boston, so we are right in the heart of the medical hub of Boston. We're close by to Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital and Beth Israel. And so a huge benefit of that is a lot of our affiliated hospitals in the Boston area are right outside your door at HSDM and you'll get to go to a lot of these hospitals as a part of your clinical rotations. So it's really exciting to be right in the hub of all of that and to get to work with clinicians and patients at these locations. And, lastly, I think the most exciting part of HSDM is that it is such a supportive and collaborative environment. So you'll have the opportunity to get to engage in this space with lots of support.

So I'm going to pass it over to Dr. Lopez to talk to you a little bit more about the curriculum.

Great. Thank you so much, Maddy. I want to build upon a little bit of what Maddy just explained about the small class size. We do have a very small class size, I think one of the smallest in the country. And within the small class size, we pair you up with a society director, such as myself, so meaning the class gets divided a little bit further, so you have more one-on-one time when you may have doubts on the lecture, you may have questions on how to do certain treatments. And our office-- our offices are always open. We're very accessible. You would reach out to me if you have any questions. But not only that, as you progress further into the curriculum, you can reach out to any society director. And we have society directors with diverse backgrounds. We have a director who graduated from our program who is now prosthodontic specialist. We have a society director who has a specialty of periodontics. And we want to make sure that all your training gets, I guess, an input from all aspects of the field of dentistry.

And, again, I want to talk a little bit about the curriculum overview in the first second-- I'm sorry, the first, second, and third year for you, but what would be our second, third, and fourth year here at Harvard School of Dental Medicine. I want to put a big emphasis of who is teaching you. You may ask yourself, why do I want to choose Harvard? We have faculty members who are authors of the books you are learning from. We have doctors-- I can put a big emphasis on Dr. Luken, who is a pioneer in water fluoridation here in the United States. We have-- if you guys are familiar with the Samet and Jotkowitz classification of teeth prognosis, Dr. Samet gives you lectures, the doctor who came up with this classifications giving you lectures. So I want to say that the emphasis, why is the people who are writing, who are doing the research, are the ones teaching you in class? And like us, your society directors, these teachers are easily accessible. They stick around after class to answer questions and they are open to the young people who will eventually take over their positions in the field of dentistry.

So to get into a little bit of the curriculum, our academic year starts in the summer-- summer/fall time. So you would be joining us in January like Ms. Maddy said. And if you look at the current DMD second year or your first year is you'll have a lot of didactic courses. And these courses have been put in place to help you catch up with the current class. And why is this important is because you will be graduating with the same degree that the Harvard School of Dental Medicine graduates graduate from. At other schools, there are distinctions that tell you in your degree that says you have done their advanced standing program. With us, your degree will be exactly the same as our current students.

So in your first year here, you will be spending a lot of time in our labs working with our professors. You will also have opportunities to rotate at the local hospitals and shadow and be taught by faculty members who work at hospitals like Boston Children's Hospital, which is a well-known hospital, and Mass General Hospital. Mass General Hospital will host our oral surgery program. So when you rotate there, not only are you going to be seeing a lot of interesting cases, but you're going to be taught by oral surgeons in the top of their field. After that, we will enter treatment of active disease. This course is meant to prep you before you start seeing patients. So if you will join us in January, by June you would start treating your own patients. All right, Maddy, can we-- there.

And in our third year or our-- your second year, you will be taking classes, taking labs, fulfilling some exams-- some licensing exams. But you will also be treating patients. So the courses in what we call final restorative treatment, treatment of the child and adolescents, and advanced surgical treatments, you will be being taught by our faculty members from these hospitals that I mentioned before. By this time, you would have your own cohort of patients that you'll be treating. I believe it's four times a week. And right now the average is between 20 to 25 patients that you'll be treating. And these opportunities-- not only are you learning new techniques and advanced techniques, but you'll be also be able to transfer those skills to treat your patients. And this is where our specialty programs get involved. You will be supervised on the clinic floor by our specialty faculty members, who you can work together to come up with the treatment plan that best fits your patient.

And Maddy, can we-- yeah, thank you. And the exciting part of the fourth year is in the fourth year you have a lot of inputs of what you want your fourth year to look like. Definitely there are some exams that you need to do, you will be treating patients, but this is also an opportunity to go visit a local community health center. It could be an opportunity to go do extra rotations at a hospital. If someone who is very interested in a specialty, like oral surgery, has the opportunity to go and spend a couple of weeks, between four to five weeks, at our local hospitals and get to know our residents there, our faculty there-- and if you're interested in that program, these people know you already. And they know how you work, they know your ethics. If you decide to elect to do-- concentrate on research, because research is a graduation requirement, you can spend, I think, a total of about five to six weeks to do research on your project in order to be able to complete it or get it to a point where you feel comfortable before you graduate. So this is a very unique thing where, at Harvard, students have a lot of input of what they want their fourth year to look like. And, again, you work closely together with your society director to make sure your graduation requirements are met. But not only that, you have a chance, like anybody else, to apply for a program and be able to get accepted to our program. And Sarah can maybe talk a little bit more about that, but we got close to 100% acceptance rate to the first choice of our students this year. And I can go ahead and hand it off to Sarah.

Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Lopez. All right, so I'm going to talk to you a little bit about admissions. How do you apply? A little bit of a 101, so the basics. The admissions requirements. What to expect during interviews? What to expect for financial aid? And then, of course, some important reminders.

So if you have a BDS in dentistry or a foreign equivalent degree, you are eligible to apply. And our application period, it opens tomorrow. Actually we're pretty excited, our first-- our inaugural cycle, March 5 to May 5, 2026. So that-- it's only two months. It's a short window because our students matriculate in January and there's a lot that needs to happen between May 5 and the time you actually arrive on campus. And as Maddy said, you'll be joining the second year class in January, the class of 2029. We are accredited for up to 10 students per year, but this number fluctuates a little bit based upon our total enrollment. We believe that we'll be enrolling-- looking to enroll eight students in the ASID program this year. And if you'd like to apply, please apply directly to CAAPID. Again, opens tomorrow. We ask that you don't send any application materials to us or bring them to school. We're just a really-- we're the smallest school in the country. We're a small office and we're trying to manage what we think is going to be a big influx of applications. So whatever you upload to CAAPID is perfectly fine for the admissions process.

All right. So what's required? So we ask for your CV or resume. A letter of intent or statement of purpose, and we ask that you limit this to 500 words. Your official transcripts or you'll upload what you have for transcripts. And later on, when you hopefully matriculate, we'll ask for official copies. Your academic credential evaluation for your foreign coursework from either ECE, the Educational Credential Evaluators, or WES, World Education services. We do require a $150 application fee. And that you pass either the INBDE or NBDE part 1 and part 2. Next, your TOEFL scores, that we have an exciting update about that later in the presentation. And then your letters of recommendation, which we'll talk about more.

So TOEFL requirements. We're pleased to tell you-- we just established this today-- I'm not even sure Dr. Lopez knows about it yet unless he's seen the slide. But these are our new TOEFL requirements. So for the new TOEFL exam, an overall score of 4.5 and subcategory scores of 4.5. Those are our requirements. And we will still accept the official old test, I think up to two years as long as ETS sends them out. And for the old test, the paper test, so to speak, our overall scores have been adjusted as seen here. So a 90 overall, a 23 speaking, a 21 for writing, 21 for reading, and a 17 for listening. Now, these scores have been adjusted slightly from our previous old TOEFL score ranges. And that's to make sure that we're in compliance with Mass license-- dental license regulations and to preserve our minimum score standards. And please note that there's also no exceptions to these minimums. But, on the upside, we now allow a waiver of TOEFL for certain situations. So we will extend the waiver to you for TOEFL if you have a degree from an accredited institution in the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, or New Zealand, where you've been taught in English. If you've taken-- if you've received a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, or a two-year minimum master's degree, not a one-year master's degree, a doctoral degree, and/or a dental degree, you will receive a waiver. So that's new for us. And we're really excited to share that with you.

In terms of acceptable test formats, we will only accept the TOEFL iBT scores. I know there's a couple of different variations of TOEFL test, but iBT is what we'd like. We will accept MyBest scores. That's when they superscore the two most recent tests, so that-- [CLEARS THROAT] excuse me-- we're only looking at the best score from each. And we-- although we prefer iBT tests that are taken at a test center, we will accept the Home Edition if you don't have an option for the other one. And, finally, this goes without saying, we'll not accept test scores that are over two years old. They're no longer official. And one quick thing that I'll add about the TOEFL scores for folks is that these are now available for you to reference on our Program Finder page on ADEA CAAPID as well as on our application page. So when that opens up tomorrow, you'll be able to see them there or on the Program Finder on ADEA CAAPID. I see that we've got a couple questions coming in. That's fabulous. We're going to hold our questions till the end. And I appreciate-- it looks like most folks are already doing this. If you've got them, use that little Q&A button at the bottom of your screen to submit your questions. But, yeah, just wanted to flag that. Well, Maddy, since the scores were just determined today through our task force, it's pretty impressive that you have it up on the website and on the Program Finder. Thank you very much. I think our students will really appreciate that. I know it was a lot of collaboration with Andrew at ADEA CAAPID too. He's a superstar. So it was a team effort. Thanks.

Now, for letters of recommendation, we do require three letters of is a recommendation, but we'll accept up to four. The fourth letter is optional. And this is what we prefer. We would prefer a dean's letter, which is an institutional evaluation form. And we'd prefer two letters from faculty who supervised your research, so principal investigator or who taught you in biology, chemistry, or physics courses. But sometimes you may not have taken traditional biology, chemistry, or physics courses. And if this is the case for your program, we'll accept a letter from a faculty member who taught you in a pre-clinical course. Now, although those are our preferred formats, we will also accept an additional letter from a PI or faculty who supervised your research or taught you in biology, chemistry, or physics. If you can't get the IEF, the institutional evaluation from your dean. And if you cannot get a third letter from your faculty member or PI, a letter from a US dentist whom you have shadowed or who has supervised you as an employer is also an acceptable substitute. And then, finally, the fourth letter can be from a recommender of your choosing. Most frequently we find that these are from dentists that candidates have shadowed. We just ask that they're not personal recommendations because they just don't tell us too much about your potential to be successful in the program. And one quick thing before we move on from requirements that I want to flag for folks, 500 words for the personal statement or the SOP, Statement Of Purpose, is what we recommend. I know CAAPID's limit is a little higher than that. If you go over 500 words, it's OK. We're not going to penalize you because we understand that CAAPID's a little bit longer.

So interviews, what to expect? There are essentially three rounds of interviews. And candidates will be invited-- if they're invited to the first interview, it'll be a virtual interview and we'll be holding these on a rolling basis from April to June. And if you're invited to this first interview, we'll email you a supplemental application that will ask you to complete and return to us before your first interview. Candidates who successfully complete the first interview may be invited for a second round or a second virtual interview. And these are also held on a rolling basis from April to June, so pretty much the same timeline. And then if you have successfully completed both rounds, you may be invited to our final round, which is a bench skills test. We expect these to be in late June. We haven't quite finalized the dates yet. We'll let you know as soon as we know what they are. And you'll be invited to campus to go on a-- you'll have a full campus tour with current ASID students. You'll also have lunch with ASID students. You'll have a three-hour hand skills assessment or bench skills assessment, which will consist of two hand exercises, but things that you would have done in dental school, nothing that you haven't seen before. We're not trying to trick you. We just want to get a sense of where you are in your hand skills. And I think that's all I was going to say there, so up to three rounds of interviews.

Unfortunately, financial aid is not available for ASID track students. However, if it's helpful to you, we-- Harvard Federal Credit Union, with whom we're were associated, offers international students a loan of up to $104,000, which may be helpful. And, of course, if you're a permanent resident or a US citizen, you're eligible to apply for government loans, Stafford loans from the US Department of Education. And, finally, for the cost of the program, we're going to drop a link into the chat for you. It's a website link for you to be able to view that. And if you have additional questions about financial aid, you're welcome to contact Mr. Gardner Key, our director of financial aid. He's happy to answer any questions you have. He's a great resource. And his email is gardner-- G-A-R-D-N-E-R-- underscore key@hsdm.harvard.edu.

Now, here's some important reminders and just things to know. So it sounds like a lot of cannots, but, again, we're a small dental school. We're trying to make sure that we're going to be successful getting all these applications in our first ASID cycle. We can't wait to meet you all. But, unfortunately, we can't offer tours for prospective students unless they're invited to interview. If you're invited to interview and you come to campus for the bench skills test, you'll have a full tour of campus. But, otherwise, unfortunately, we just don't have the manpower to be able to offer tours to candidates. We, also, because we're so small and because it wouldn't be fair to other applicants, are unable to counsel candidates on how to strengthen their application or make it the best it can be. We wish we could. And we have a postdoctoral advanced graduate education programs at HSDM. If you're in an AGE program or you're interested in AGE program, just know that the ASID program and the AGE program can't be combined in a dual degree format.

And then next we ask that you use the designated email and phone number to contact us with advanced standing questions. It's the funnel that we all have access to help us manage our workflow. If you could please email us with questions at hsdm advanced standing@hsdm.harvard.edu. If you call, you won't get a live person right away, but we ask that you leave a detailed voicemail with your name, callback number, and as much information about your reason for calling as possible so that we can get the answer and hopefully give you a quick call back and let you know what that is. And, again, it's just about managing our workflow and we appreciate your patience. And TOEFL requirements were determined the last bullet. And as Maddy said, they now are available on the Program Finder and on the HSDM ASID web page.

I'll turn it back to Maddy.

Thanks so much, Sarah. So just before we hop into our Q&A portion, I want to spend a little bit of time going over some frequent questions that we get. Hopefully this answers some of your questions before we start the Q&A so that you just have the information you need.

One of the questions we get a lot is about international students' eligibility. Can you apply if you're already on a visa? Can you apply if you're international? And the answer is yes. Our program offers visa sponsorships for international students. If you're on a current visa that allows for study in the United States, you are eligible to apply. And if your current visa does not allow for study in the United States, you'll need to change to a visa sponsored by HSDM. We have a wonderful international office at Harvard called the Harvard International Office. And I will put that link in the chat as well for more information on the visa process.

Another really common question that we get is about GPA minimums. Is there a GPA minimum to apply? We do not have a GPA minimum. We do tend to prioritize candidates who have mostly A's and B's on their transcripts. Again, that's looking at the ECE course evaluations, A's and B's primarily. But there is no GPA minimum to apply.

Another question we get a lot, just-- it's a language thing and it varies program by program, does a personal statement on CAAPID count as a letter of intent? Yes, it does. So your personal statement, a statement of purpose, a letter of intent-- you'll hear all these terms thrown around, they're all the same thing.

A couple other questions that we get frequently. We mentioned that fourth letter of recommendation, which is optional for you to share, it is not required-- but if you have an additional letter and you want to share it with us, you can do so through ADEA CAAPID. There is a document section and there'll be instructions on how to upload that fourth letter there. One caveat with this fourth letter is since you will be uploading it yourself, we ask that it has your recommender's signature on it. So with the rest of them, it'll be the way that you would upload them normally with CAAPID. Typically that means you're sending out requests via email through CAAPID and then your recommenders are submitting. With this fourth letter and the optional document, that's where we'll ask for the signature specifically so that when it's uploaded, we can verify that it is written by a recommender.

Can you still apply if you did not pass the INDBE or NDBE exam on the first try? Absolutely. It is just a requirement that you've passed. It does not-- if you had to take it a couple of times to pass, that does not disqualify you from applying.

And then another very common question we get is whether or not HSDM prioritizes applicants with previous research experience, work experience, or advanced graduate degrees? We do not prioritize applicants with previous experience in research, or work experience, or advanced graduate degrees. Our only requirement is that you have completed a BDS degree or a foreign degree equivalent. We complete very holistic application reviews and so we're really looking at everything that you bring to the table, which will be very different from candidate to candidate. So there's no one particular degree that's going to give you an edge. It's a very holistic and personal reveal.

And, with that, we're going to hop into our Q&A. I want to take an opportunity to introduce our three wonderful student panelists who will be supporting with the Q&A. The way that this Q&A session is going to work is-- I already see we've got lots of great questions that were submitted through the Q&A button, so keep sending them there. I'm going to read through them and make sure that I am capturing what we can capture. And then I will ask the questions out loud to our panelists here because that way, if a lot of you have the same question, everybody gets to hear the answer instead of us just going one at a time. But before we dive into the questions, I will turn it over to our students to just give us a quick introduction of themselves.