I am starting my second year of four at the Dental College of Georgia! I’ll graduate with a Doctorate Degree in Dental Medicine. In the future I plan on pursuing a residency in pediatrics or general practice dentistry.
My entire experience from Georgia Tech has prepared me beyond the academic rigor of dental school. It also gave me the confidence I needed to balance a social life and academics in school.
I studied Biology at Georgia Tech and completed a certificate in business. Dentistry requires you to act as a clinician and a business person. I think choosing a concentration in business gives me a different perspective towards production/operation cost/liabilities when it comes to the business aspect of the career.
I use my degree in biology in my academic studies daily in classes like biochemical basis of dentistry, molecular craniofacial development, physiology etc. In the clinic I also apply my studies in biology to working on a living organism whose body is a complex ecosystem of a number of communities.
The mouth itself is a delicate ecosystem in which the population/count of organisms has to be carefully balanced as if not to cause diseases that can lead to cavities, periodontal/gum disease, or potential systemic diseases.
Working in a molecular biology lab, taking epidemiology, and public health while I was at Georgia Tech taught me a lot about infection control and the conditions in which organisms will thrive and multiply. This has made my hypersensitive to infection control in the clinic – but will protect me and help me prevent the spread of infectious diseases.
While you are on campus do your best to explore all aspects of your degree program and the different certificates/minors that are available to you. Biology is applicable to almost everything in life – you would be surprised how two different degrees could lead you to developing/growing a new field!
Everyone should try research because without research the field stays stagnant. I didn’t think research would be super applicable as a pre-dental student, but it taught me a lot about how to question different techniques, practices, and ideas in my field. It also taught me a lot about how delicate a microenvironment is to support life and how I would apply that on a macro scale to the human body.
Georgia Tech is a difficult school. If you are accepted and graduate from the school, you should consider it a big accomplishment. The rigor of the curriculum in the school of science will prepare you for any career path you choose to pursue. Many schools I interviewed with (even in the north east) saw that I graduated from GT and were immediately interested. As a whole GT is recognized across the world, and so is the college of science. As a biology student at GT that means you too!
