Student Life Blogs

SCO Student Makayla Porter, ’21, writes about the externship experiences in her fourth year: Things are winding down in the final days before graduation – less than a month to go! My time in school honestly flew by so quickly, and it’s crazy to think about how much I’ve learned in the past 4 years. While the classroom work done during the first three years of school had a large part in preparing me to become a practicing optometrist someday, the thing... Read More

For the first two years of school, your experiences will be primarily classroom or lab-based. As a second-year you will observe different forms of patient care in clinic, but third year is when you actually start seeing your own patients. Throughout the week you will have classroom lecture every morning from roughly 8 AM to 10 AM. After that, you will either have lab or clinic. Two days out of the week you will have labs after lecture, similar to those that you will experience your first and... Read More

Hi, all! I’d like to talk about something I’ve become involved in that has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done at SCO (and that’s saying a lot!). I’m working on getting my second semester of second year underway, and still the best advice I can offer to any student is to get involved. During first year, I was given the opportunity to be on the executive council for an up and coming idea. It started with a small group of students that wanted a volunteer... Read More

Hi, all!  My name is Makayla and I’m a first year.  I’d like to talk a little bit about the biggest reservation I had when considering the move to Memphis. Coming from a small town of less than 4,000 people, I thought I was about to become a small fish in a big pond. As someone who likes to be involved in the community, how could I possibly make a difference in a town of over 652,000?   SCO White Coat Ceremony Now that I’ve been in Memphis for... Read More