SOP is a very crucial part of your application, this can be a deciding factor to get you an interview. It is a great way to express yourself in the form of a story. As the name suggests it is your statement of purpose to join DDS/DMD Program, it should be unique, it should be authentic. This is a means to give an idea about yourself in a paper to the admissions personnel.
Tips for a Good SOP
- SOP should be of 5200 characters (including spaces)
- Write about 7000-8000 characters, so you have more content than needed, you can delete the least important ones. If you have less content it is difficult to add more characters.
- Just remember, nobody can write your story better than you. (Take professional help only to get some grammatical errors corrected etc but not to write your story itself)
- Start writing at least 2 months before the cycle starts, so have enough time to prepare your perfect SOP.
- Try to keep it simple and not use complicated words that we do not use in our daily language.
- Write down some bullet points on your achievements (doesn’t necessarily have to be related to dentistry, good to also have dentistry related if you have any), then you can connect all the points into a beautiful story.
- The SOP should flow smoothly from the beginning to the end, it should be interesting for the reader.
- Mention things about yourself outside of dentistry (like leadership qualities, organization skills, full-time mom, a sky diver, a dance instructor etc )
- Since everybody will have a Dental Degree, NBDE and TOEFL which is common, mention something outside of these.
- There might be few things you did outside of dentistry like working in an IT job or did a Master’s in Health Care or got a break of 10 years after dental school due to personal reasons, all you have to do is to be able to explain all the good things that you learnt from those situations which might be helpful to make you a better person or a good dentist or be helpful when you set up your own practice.
- Also mention your future plans, like what do you want to do after DDS, if you wanna go into research or want to pursue residency in a particular field or work in a community clinic etc.
- Often applicants mention what they are going to achieve if they get an admission in the school but forget to mention what they have to offer to the school or to the dental society when they get accepted. Schools do look at what you have to provide.
- Last but not the least, have your friends or family members who are not dentists (an engineer/ a doctor/ a chef) read your SOP and get their feedback, it just adds another dimension of perspective.
- I can go on and on about SOP, because there is never enough information on this part.
Life of Foreign Dentist in USA 