The road to becoming a dentist is long—from discovering your interest in dentistry to engaging in dental-related extracurricular activities to completing your pre-dental requirements and, finally, to the dental school application itself. This guide will walk you through the dental school application year, presenting an ideal timeline to complete and submit all of your application materials.
One piece of advice that all dental school advisors agree on is that the earlier you submit your application, the better. This is because most dental schools practice rolling admissions, meaning that they review applications and offer interviews and admissions decisions continually—as opposed to waiting for all applications to be submitted before beginning to review them. This means that if you submit your application early you will be competing against fewer applicants for the greatest number of available seats.
It’s important, however, to balance the quality of your application materials with the benefits of submitting early. You don’t want to submit sub-par essays. Rather, you should aim to get ahead of things so that you can produce high quality materials, with a minimum of anxiety, and submit them as early as possible. Since secondary essay prompts are not released until your primary application has been processed, this will mean pre-writing responses that you can then adapt to each school’s specific prompts.
ADEA AADSAS is the centralized application system for most U.S. and Canadian dental schools and TMDSAS is the centralized application system for public dental schools in Texas. While this dental school application timeline will detail the deadlines for these two systems, we also encourage you to consult their websites for further information.
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July 2024
While this has not been officially announced for the 2024-2025 cycle, in 2023 AADSAS opened on May 9th, with submissions beginning on May 30th. We will update this guide as soon the new dates are announced.
We typically recommend taking your final DAT no later than April so that you can focus on essay writing for some of April and in May and June.
It takes about 3-4 weeks for your DAT scores to be returned, so if you take the test in May you should still receive your scores by June. Again, we recommend submitting your AADSAS application by July 15th at the latest (though closer to June 1st is ideal), so if you take the DAT in early June it is still possible to meet this deadline.
Taking the DAT in May or June, however, makes for greater time pressure. You might be able to mitigate this pressure by writing your essays earlier in the year and devoting March, April and some of May to DAT prep.
Dental school applicants are often able to strengthen their admissions profiles by waiting to apply during a future cycle, assuming they use this time to deepen their extracurricular involvements, boost their grades, or improve their DAT score. You can look at the average GPA and DAT scores of accepted students at the schools to which you are applying to see how you stack up. If your “counting stats” are significantly below the schools’ averages it might be in your interest to spend an extra year strengthening your application.
This decision also depends on how eager you are to start dental school and whether you would like to delay the start of your career. Some students appreciate taking a short break from coursework in order to explore their own interests and come back to school with renewed excitement.
While the AADSAS application does not technically close until the beginning of February, for all intents and purposes, we consider applications submitted after July 15 to be “late.” This is because it takes time for your application to be verified.Many schools will then invite you to submit their supplemental applications, after which they will review your application and decide whether or not to offer you an interview. As mentioned previously, interviewing early will greatly improve your chances of receiving a coveted acceptance offer on December 15th.
So, while an application submitted in August or later will not necessarily be disqualified on grounds of tardiness, submitting your application at such a late date leaves you at a serious disadvantage. Due to rolling admissions, there are simply fewer and fewer available seats as the admissions cycle progresses.
It’s also important to remember that your full application will not be reviewed until your supplemental application has been received. Students often submit their primary AADSAS application as early as possible but then take extra time with school-specific supplemental essays, thereby negating any benefit of submitting early.
