The Illinois College of Optometry Student Blog

The first week back at school after any break is always challenging, but after you have been away for three quarters, the adjustment is even harder. Each day is a different schedule, in a different type of specialty, with different preceptors. While adjusting to a new schedule can be tiresome and difficult, adjusting to the city is much easier. Since being back, we have foregone the diet for a week and have been enjoying the Chicago food scene. The first meal back was the fam

It’s my turn. Boards are just around the corner. In optometry school, the NBEO exams come in three parts. The first part, a test of your knowledge on classes taken while in school, is supposed to be the hardest.  In order to prepare, I’ve chosen to purchase a study tool called KMK. Part of the package is that live instructors come to the school for two weekends for a crash course in boards studying. Those weekends were some of the busiest and most stressful weekends I’ve had

During fourth year at ICO, you meet tons of optometry students from other schools at your rotations. At both my first and third sites, we had 3 students from 2 different schools each. Sharing our experiences, we all found similarities and differences between optometry schools. Clinical experience: Some other schools don’t have students start clinical experiences until their second year. Then, it is often just shadowing. ICO, however, begins right away. During the first quarte

Although the optometric community is considered to be small, it is full of great minds. Just within my class alone, ICO’s class of 2019, there are so many varied professional interests. With some interested in the politics and law side of optometry, others are greatly interested prescribing low vision devices and the rehabilitation that comes with severe vision loss. I never knew going into the profession that there were so many options to pursue beyond just primary care. As

Now that I’ve hit my third year of optometry school and boards are right around the corner, I really wanted to do something for myself as a refresher. Growing up, my family wasn’t able to take trips together outside of the country. Now that I’m outside of the house and I’ve saved up a little, I really wanted to start traveling. Since ICO is on the quarter system, we have a week “break” in between each quarter. As a third year, you do have clinic during this week, but the size