P is for PASS

“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest”…. This is the fortune in my cookie that I opened as I was studying for boards in February and boy was it motivating!

I cannot believe that over 6 months have passed since my last blog post because I feel like it was just yesterday. Well as you can guess a lot has happened not only in school, but in my personal life also. January- March can be summed up in one word… BOARDS. All I did nearly every day was study for Boards Part I. Boards Part I is a two day (8 hour/ day), 500 question written exam that is taken March of your third year in Optometry School. My typical day during Boards was to go to class from 8-12pm, then clinic from 1-5:30p.m. then come home to study for my classes and then finish the night by studying for boards. Honestly it was one of the hardest times of my life, but looking back now, it went by very quickly and I am very thankful to have studied everything that I did because I feel like it was a great refresher on all of the little details that we have learned over the past three years. The actual boards exam was on Tuesday March 15th and Wednesday March 16th and immediately the morning after boards a few of us left to go celebrate and relax in Nashville, Tennessee which was absolutely perfect! After completing boards they told us that we would have to wait to find out our scores until the beginning of May so there began the waiting game.

At the end of March, I was finally getting back to my normal happy self. It took a few weeks to fully relieve my stress from studying from boards, and to get back to my normal schedule since I had studied and worried about the test for so long. Well Easter weekend, my then boyfriend proposed to me through an adorable Easter Egg Hunt in front of my family. This was such an exciting time to be done with Boards, to be wrapping up my final semester in the classroom, and then to now have the announcement of a Wedding!! So everything has been pretty great since then. I have finished out the semester and the Class of 2017 took our last Final Exam all together in one room. The week after finishing finals, in early May, I received the news that I had received a P on Boards which means… that I PASSED!!! This meant that I could finally take a deep breath and relax!! And very soon after this announcement, all of my classmates headed our separate ways to begin our 4th year rotations. I will talk a little bit more about how these rotations work in my next post, as now I would like to touch on what I did last weekend.

While in undergrad, two of my close friends (Jenny Conn and Kait Kohler) came to me with an idea to start a Pre-Optometry Public Health group at The Ohio State University called “Eyes on Health” (EOH) and we teamed up with one of the Doctors in the College of Optometry, Dr. Joan Nerderman. It was through her that the EOH group began to go on trips to help with Remote Area Medical (RAM). I went on our first trip with the group in June of 2011, and had such an amazing experience as we traveled to rural Pikeville, Kentucky to give eye care. Now fast forward 5 years later and the EOH teamed up with a group in the College called Fellowship of Christian Optometrists and we were able to send 14 Pre-Optometry Students, 12 Optometry Students, and 4 wonderful Doctors to provide eye care to over 150 patients on Saturday in Huntsville, Tennessee. It was such an amazing experience to see how far I have come in Optometry in that for this trip I was able to work directly with diagnosing and treating our patients. We were set up in several classrooms in the local high school and it was great to be sitting by 6 of my 4th year classmates and to hear us all diagnosing and educating our patients independently. We still have so much to learn to become great Optometrists, but it was great to truly see how far we have all come.

Overall, it has been a roller coaster of ups and downs over the past 6 months, but now us 4th years are smooth sailing for a few months as we are all out on our 4th year rotations learnings as much as we possibly can. I will be back very soon to tell you all about how great my rotations are currently going, but for now it’s time to relax for a little bit to prepare for tomorrow’s busy schedule.