<p>I was in a 7 year program with SUNY Geneseo and UB Dental School where I did 3 years at geneseo and I was then given a seat at UB dental school. I finished my 3 of years of geneseo and finished the first 2 years of dental school. My first year of dental school classes were transfered to geneseo to count as my fourth year of college and I received a B.S. in Biology from Geneseo. </p>
<p>But in May of 2012 I was dismissed from dental school. I now have written on my transcript: Expulsion from the University for reason of academic dishonesty. Long story short, in dental school we had quizzes we had to take online for a couple different courses. These quizzes, though being online, had to be taken in class. But a few days I had the quizzes I had woken up late or other circumstances and I took the quizzes outside of class. I ended up doing badly on all the quizzes but one of my professors found out I took a quiz outside of class and decided to take it up with the Judicial Council. I ended up saying I was guilty and the judicial council recommended that I repeat a year. But the thing with the UB Judicial System is that the Judicial Council can only give recommendations to the Dean of the school. The Dean of the school can make any judgement/decision he wants. And so he decided that instead of following the recommendations of the Judicial council I was to be dismissed. I'm sure that part of his decision was due to my poor/bad grades during dental school. </p>
<p>Anyway it's been over a year since then and now I am thinking of applying for MPH programs. I have signed up for the GRE next month. My parents/research I did online about dismissals and expulsions said I should try to send letters to the Dean of the dental school explaining how I've changed and what I am doing. So I have been sending letters every month for the last 4 months. But I haven't received any responses. </p>
<p>So I wanted input on my chances of acceptance to any MPH programs despite the expulsion on my dental school transcript and my poor grades during dental school.</p>
<p>First of all, stop sending letters every month. At this point, you are just annoying the dean. I’m not even sure that the initial advice to send letters to the dean to “explain how you’ve changed” was good, anyway. What has explaining how you’ve changed and what you’ve been doing in the interim got to do with anything? If you wanted to get back into dental school, the thing to do would be to make an appointment to speak with the dean (in person is better, by phone works) to find out what it is he wants from you for you to get readmitted to the school. It’s possible that there’s nothing you can do at all to get readmitted because he won’t allow it, and then you’re wasting your time. But that aside, even you send a letter, you should send ONE letter. Then perhaps one more if the dean does not respond in 2-3 weeks, and then drop it or call. Sending letters every month is not going to help you.</p>
<p>But onto MPH programs. I think that SOPHAS (the application system) has a place where you can attach a supplemental essay explaining personal circumstances, including past academic difficulties. This is a time when I would use that to briefly and straightforwardly explain what happened. No emotions, no commentary or speculation on your part - just the facts. Personally, as an outsider reading the facts I think it’s utterly ridiculous that you got expelled for something like this, and would personally disregard it when deciding whether or not to admit you to the class. But if you add a “woe is me” tone you’ll turn people off and make people wonder about your maturity.</p>
<p>If possible, I would also try to get a recommender who thinks very highly of you to address it in his or her letter of recommendation. Perhaps one of your dental school professors or professors at UB can comment briefly on it. Having a third party discuss it and assure the admissions team that despite this blip in your past, you’d be a very good candidate for their program can really help your application. Preferably it’d be someone who already has some knowledge of the situation.</p>
<p>You can explain the poor grades from dental school as realizing that dental school wasn’t really for you, but what you are passionate about is population health and healing many at once. This explanation will not work as well if you are applying for epidemiology or environmental health sciences, as those are both more science-based fields within public health.</p>
<p>Wait so your transcript actually says academic dishonesty? From my what I’ve heard, my university doesn’t explicitly report academic violations on the transcript themselves, but it does if another institution requests that information.</p>
<p>Does anyone know if graduate schools usually go far enough to request academic violation records from a school explicitly?</p>
<p>I am thinking that the dean’s decision was not based so much on your poor academic performance alone, but rather was heavily influenced by the fact that your cheating was not a one-time aberration, but a pattern of behavior–and that the pattern of cheating was based on the fact that you couldn’t be bothered to get up and get to school on time, for whatever reasons, much less be bothered to actually learn the material you were responsible for learning. What kind of dentist were you going to make?</p>
<p>So–what have you done in the year and a half since you were dismissed?What have you accomplished? How have you changed?</p>
<p>Why should an MPH program accept you, much less accept you over a student without such a scar on his record?</p>
<p>Juillet:
Wow I never realized that writing the letters could be a bad thing and be turning the dean off. I guess my family’s advice turned out to be useless. If I don’t get a response from this letter (which I don’t expect to), I’m going to call the dean’s office to schedule a time to talk to the dean. But from my experience in the past he seems like the type of person who’s not going to change his mind. But I’ll try anyway, only because it says the academic dishonesty on my record. (Well it shows it on my unofficial transcript and I’m assuming then it will show up on the official one as well)</p>
<p>For the Sophas thing, I did see that they put a spot for writing about academic/personal circumstances. It says: “Have you ever been required to withdraw from an institution, been terminated or disciplined for academic performance or conduct violations? If you answered yes to this question, please address in one paragraph or less in the Other Relevant Information section.”
So now I have to explain the whole situation in one paragraph and I’ve been mulling over for like a week and a half what exactly I’m going to be writing.</p>
<p>As for the recommendations, I’m going to try and reach out to one of my professors at UB. You can only put 5 recommendations up on SOPHAS and I already have 2 from Geneseo, and I have 2-3 dentists I’ve worked for after I got out of dental school I was going to get recommendations from. I can try to get one recommendation from the professor in UB and switch out one of the doctors. Oh I’ve been working at dental offices since I got out of dental school. </p>
<p>Duaneread:
Yes my (unofficial) transcript actually says academic dishonesty. From UB’s website: “Expulsion from the University:With comment on the transcript. Only the University President or his/her designee may expel a student from the University.”</p>
<p>Boysx3:
I have the feeling that it was also probably because I did it multiple times and I remember him saying to me that if I could do this with the quizzes how would act as a doctor. In the year and a half since I’ve been dismissed I’ve been working! I worked with a general dentist for 4 months and then I worked for a oral surgeon for 6 months and I would have stayed with the oral surgeon for longer but I wanted to move out of buffalo (didn’t want to be in buffalo any more for many reasons). And I moved to NYC a few months ago and I’m now working at a Pediatric dental office. I started with assisting but now I’m doing a lot more Operations of the group practice (We have 8 offices in NYC) and I’m really loving it and it’s one of the reasons I want to do the MPH.
The one change that I’ve really noticed about myself is how much more driven and confident I am. I have a goal and I know what I want and need to do. I didn’t give up even after going through the whole expulsion thing.
I think I should be accepted by an MPH program because I have a drive to change how dental care is run. Right now our system is completely based around serving only those people that can afford dental care and leave many people, including many many children addressed. Kids shouldn’t have to suffer tooth pain just because they don’t have access to dental care. On top of that over 70% of tooth pain is preventable. I want to move our dental care to doing proactive preventive work over reactive work. I don’t want patients to come in only when they are hurting. I want them to be assured that they are doing everything to be healthy and never in pain. And this is especially close to me because I’ve gone through knowing what is to be reactive and not proactive. Most applicants for an MPH program won’t even know what they want to do with it. I’m deadset on what I want to accomplish.</p>
<p>And I want to either get into Health Practice management or Health Policy. But I’m also very involved in human rights and health. (I’m really into Amnesty International too)</p>