We didn't have a rank. Just GPA - mine was 3.9+. Depending on what speciality you want to do, your rank needs to be higher than others. If you want to do something like perio, you can probably get away with not being ranked very highly. If you want to do ortho/omfs, the higher the better. Even then, there are a lot of expensive ortho programs these days that will take anyone lol.
). I guess the biggest advantage of going to a school with a lot of people that want to specialize is, well, youre surrounded by others that want to specialize. Having other like minded people around you helps - whether that's with research, knowing how to go about studying for something like the CBSE, or even making connections with upper class men that match into various residency programs. 
You don't think a dental school should be "more general dentistry focused"? That's a strange thought in my opinion. Should dental schools in the US try to graduate only ortho-minded, OS-minded, Perio-minded, and Prosth-minded individuals? Who is going to do the bread and butter dentistry? Or do you just want every person in the country paying specialty fees for specialists?We didn't have a rank. Just GPA - mine was 3.9+. Depending on what speciality you want to do, your rank needs to be higher than others. If you want to do something like perio, you can probably get away with not being ranked very highly. If you want to do ortho/omfs, the higher the better. Even then, there are a lot of expensive ortho programs these days that will take anyone lol.
Penn was....okay... I wanted to do OMFS so I always wished we had a medical curriculum (If you want to do OMFS, go to a school with a med curriculum). The admin sucked and there is definitely a shift towards being a more general dentistry focused school which I didn't agree with at all but thats a topic for another time. I think we got very strong didactic and clinical experience from what I've seen/heard from speaking to others. I would put our clinical requirement numbers amongst the top - especially during the pandemic (our school increased requirements when other schools were decreasing their's....
Dental school is a lot of what you make of it. The opportunities are out there, you just gotta go after them. Since I wanted to do OMFS, I spent more time in my school's OMFS department and was able to extract 300+ teeth and do a bunch of other stuff.
Depending on what OMFS program you attend, you typically always have to pay for med school. Certain programs off set the cost by giving you scholarship/stipend. Others don't. I'm paid a stipend during med school, and I'm able to get in state tuition which helps a lot.
Honestly, I would go organ system by organ system and watch pathome/BnB for each organ system. Then immediately hit questions for that organ system. You'll do the most learning using UWorld in my experience. Let that guide you and look up anything from the questions you don't know.
There are certain dental schools that are chosen by students because they want to specialize - or at least have the option to. That is why people pay more to go to Penn/Columbia/Harvard than their state schools. When you take away a lot of what helped students specialize at the aforementioned schools, what was the point in them going there anyway? For example, at Penn, because the Dean was so adamant about us being in clinic, they slashed our vacation time, took breaks away, decreased the time we got to do externships, set up mandatory night clinic etc. Of course you need to graduate as a competent general dentist, but when you advertise yourself as a school that will help students specialize, and then go the complete opposite direction, why would anybody ever choose to go there over their state school? The new dean definitely fails to realize that, and I wouldn't be surprised if Penn becomes the new NYU.
The issue isn't Penn's dean or curriculum, the issue is students like yourself that believe Penn/Columbia/Harvard are "specialty" schools that allow students to "have the option to" specialize. Every dental school allows for that opportunity, not just the Ivy Leagues of the world. People pay more to go to Penn/Columbia/Harvard because they have ego's and care about the title of the school, when in reality you can specialize from your state school for $200K less. Most people I know literally do not care where you graduated from -- they judge based off your skills.
