Fall quarter officially ended last week and I was looking forward to integrating back into society after three long months of living in an optometric bubble. Before heading home to Ottawa, I took a quick trip to Waterloo to visit my alma mater as a guest speaker on behalf of ICO at the UW Pre-Optometry Club. I hadn’t been back to the University of Waterloo for almost two years and everything felt foreign to me, with all the new buildings, new landscaping and new faces.
Gifts from the UWaterloo Pre-Optometry Club
At the end of my hour-long presentation, one of the students and her father came up to speak to me. Though she’s still in high school, she’s decided to get an early start by visiting different optometry schools to learn more about them and their programs. As it turned out, she and her father are devoted readers of OptometryStudents.com of which I am a contributing author.
They’ve been following my articles and saw the event I posted regarding the presentation I would be making in Waterloo, and decided to make the trip to hear me talk about ICO. I was touched. I would never have expected to meet OptometryStudents.com readers, let alone those who knew who I was and would make the effort to travel just to listen to what I had to say. I suddenly felt important, like the Robin Sparkles of optometry.
Until that night, I wasn’t sure if my contributions to OptometryStudents.com or here on the ICO blog have been helpful to anyone. But now I know better and I can’t even describe how happy that makes me feel.
What a great way to kick off my break!