During our meeting on March 19th, Jen Bennett was kind enough to come in to speak with us and was able to really give us some great insight to Ohio State’s Optometry School! Thank you to Jen for coming to speak with us and offering so much guidance.
Jen had some very good advice which included stressing the importance of practicing for interviews and explained that interviewing is just storytelling about your own story. This was very helpful to think about as sometimes it can be stressful, so thinking about it as prepping to tell your own story maybe makes it a little less intimidating. Another key point was prep. It is important to have knowledge of the Optometry profession in addition to academic preparation and showing your leadership potential.
In the process to applying to Optometry school, it is very important to know yourself or get to know yourself and having some kind of self-awareness. It could help to ask yourself, “What is my competitive advantage?”. There are some useful resources to discovering this such as through finding character strengths, a site such as the Gallup strengths finder could be useful to help in this area. Also, it is very important to again know your stories, this includes listing your experiences. Jen told us a few times about how practice was important and that it would be very helpful to practice ahead of time. Another method we were given is the S/TAR Method- Situation/Tasks, Actions, and Results, this can help to develop your story and ace that interview!
Thank you, Jen for all of the advice, we will definitely be using it on the road to Optometry school! We really appreciated you coming to speak with us!