So I have been lax about the posting here and I apologize for that. As you can imagine, things have been pretty busy. Most important is that I completed my first year and received my white coat. I cannot tell you the sense of accomplishment my classmates and I felt once we got them. This had been something we worked towards for the whole year. We earned this! It was even better to have our friends and family there to celebrate with us.

                So then my summer break started and I had the most amount of free time I had all year.  I filled that time with some summer fun and work at a local optometrist’s office. There I was trained to work in all aspects of the office including the front desk, pretesting, and optical work. The experience has been invaluable so far and has helped me learn more about the business of optometry. It has also already helped me with some of my classes. I’ll keep this job throughout my remaining years of optometry school for both a source of income and for experience. I would recommend this to anyone who has the time.

                Summer could not last forever unfortunately and I did have to return to school; this time as a second year and with a new class of first years. I haven’t gotten a chance to meet all of them yet but the ones that I have are wonderful people and were eager for the school year to start. It had a lot of nostalgic feelings seeing the first years go through a lot of the same Orientation and Welcome Week activities that I did just last year.

                One major event that has already happened was my first day in pre-clinic and my first time using my white coat! During this whole semester, we will finally be learning about how to do a full eye exam from start to finish. It’s an exciting but daunting process given the number of things we will have to learn. For our first lab we started out with taking a patient history and their visual acuities. My instructor emphasized always keeping eye contact with our patient and show that we are listening to them. This way can start building a good trusting doctor-patient relationship. Overall it was great to finally be in lab and learning how to be a doctor.

I’ll keep everyone posted on the other things going on at our school this year. It should be a busy one!