Suddenly… I was a third year.
I swear I just wrote to you all about living in Chicago and nervously starting my first year of school. However, suddenly, I look around and the hallways look a little more familiar and clinic time is on the upward spiral as I shift into my third year of optometry school.
Second year proved to be a whirlwind in itself, filled most notably with practicals testing our clinical skills. These included everything from palpating for lymph nodes to assessing the most peripheral parts of the back of the eye. It is no joke that academics are of the utmost importance here, but I personally take greater comfort in knowing that ICO puts a much higher precedence on our clinical knowledge, application, and efficiency. After all, what will I be after school but… an optometrist? I would like to be a competent one, and I can feel that ICO is slowly making the Dr. Rina Sheth, O.D. that I had always planned to be. Of course right now, in the midst of it, it has been feeling like school will never end, but then suddenly… here I am, seeing patients by myself.
So now, I’m at the penultimate step in optometry school, third year. Filled with three clinic shifts, two at the Illinois Eye Institute and one at CPS (Chicago Public Schools), I’m finding that much more of my time isn’t sitting behind a desk – although don’t get me wrong, there is still much studying to do and much knowledge to absorb. I am frantically moving in between said clinic shifts and labs and class. This differs greatly from second year, where much of my time was in lab practicing skills to be one day hopefully apply in clinic. I’m beginning to feel like this is the moment that I had been waiting for: having enough knowledge where I can begin to see an entire educational career culminate into an actual career. I hope to solidify that knowledge this year.
Well, I write this blog in the very first week of my third year. I know it will get harder. There will be many days where I will be tired from the hustle and bustle of summer quarter here at ICO (especially taking the most demanding class in our academic career, Retina.) If there is one thing that is becoming more evident to me, day in and day out, it is that I have the makings of an optometrist in the sooner-than-I-think future.