*RUTGERS DENTAL or STONY BROOK DENTAL*?

I'm currently finishing up my 4th year at Stony Brook. As with any school, there are pros and cons. But addressing your concerns:

There is definitely no shortage of patients. They keep trying to give me more patients and I'm already booked out about 2-3 weeks to begin with. We service the lower income/elderly population of pretty much all of Long Island. We graduate with a minimum of 14 arches of removable and 24 crowns, with almost everyone doing significantly more of both, which from what I understand is on the higher end of dental schools.

Small class size is nice in my opinion. Everyone has their own dental chair so you're not having to schedule chair time to see patients. For the most part everyone gets along and works together to get through big tests or sharing patients to complete requirements. I don't know that that happens in classes with larger class sizes. However, I used to kind of enjoy the anonymity of a large class size (went to a large undergrad) so being in a small class for me was kind of a shock in the beginning. There's no hiding, and pretty much everyone knows everything you do at all times.

In terms of specializing, we are a school that has no class rank and no GPA. This is good in the sense that everyone works together and there's no real competition between classmates. But I did receive a ton of questions on residency interviews asking how program directors were supposed to tell us apart. That being said, we ended up placing I think 4/4 to OMFS, 3/4 to ortho, 4/4 peds, 1/1 prosth , and most everyone else to one of their top choice GPRs. In term's of OMFS, it is helpful that we take about a year of basic sciences with the med school, so the NBME exam that we are required to take is a little bit more manageable. It's not as much as a Harvard or UConn, but it does make a difference compared to some of the other applicants who have zero med school experience.

Finally, if it were me I would be following the money. Dental school aint cheap (even at Stony) so any dollar you save is gonna make your life easier in the future. I'm pretty sure at this point I'm personally paying for the guy over at Henry Schein's to send his kids to college. My number one factor in choosing dental schools was cost. Everyone comes out a dentist no matter where you go, and the majority of learning as a dentist takes place when you get out on your own. You might as well go somewhere that won't cripple you in the future.

That all being said, I know literally nothing about Rutgers, except that they have a pretty solid OMFS program and they were my 3rd choice for undergrad. So you might want to hear from that perspective as well.

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*RUTGERS DENTAL or STONY BROOK DENTAL*?