Hi, readers! Last time I wrote I talked a lot about classes and our new exam week schedule. However, one thing I have noticed over and over again when I give prospective students/admissions interview tours of the campus is that people tend to have more questions about labs and pre-clinical activities than they do about the actual courses. Labs are a huge part of our schedule and they’re extremely important since they give us the hands-on experience and exposure to things we’ll be doing every day once we’re seeing patients in the clinic. The labs we have in optometry school are very different than what most labs are like in college. Rather than being focused on pre-lab questions, lab reports, and worksheets, our labs put a major emphasis on clinical applications of the things we’re learning about in our courses. Since this tends to be an area prospective students have a lot of questions about, I figured I would give a short summary of some of our second year spring semester labs to give y’all an idea of what they’re like.
The lab that we’ve had every semester and that is the most important lab in terms of clinical skills is our Optometric Theory & Methods lab. As first year students, we mastered skills in this lab such as retinoscopy, chair skills, and actually refracting a patient. By the end of our first year we could perform the first half of an eye exam and were comfortable with determining a glasses prescription for a patient. Second year skills in this lab focus on the dilated retinal exam. We began with fundoscopy in July and spent the past seven months working on different ways to examine the retina: fundoscopy and Binocular Indirect Ophthalmoscopy. This lab requires a LOT of practicing outside of lab hours to master these difficult skills. However, it’s a lot of fun to learn these skills and finally say that we can perform the majority of an eye exam! Between having our eyes dilated multiple times a week, practicing for practical exams, and choosing and purchasing all of our equipment, this lab has been a huge part of our time as students here. When we start seeing patients at The Eye Center in three short months, I know we’ll feel prepared and ready because of all of our time spent in this lab!
To supplement the skills we’re learning in our Optometric Theory & Methods lab, we have two additional pre-clinical labs this semester: our Anterior Segment and Posterior Segment labs. In these labs (which also take place in our pre-clinical lab rooms with fully functional exam lanes) we learn additional skills to evaluate the health of the front of the eye (cornea, lens, eyelids, etc) and the back of the eye (the retina). Our Anterior Segment lab is extra exciting this semester because we finally get to learn to perform all of our injection procedures. It sounds a little scary at first, but I know I want all the practice I can get before I perform them on actual patients at the clinic!
Another important set of labs that we’ve had is our Ophthalmic Optics and Contact Lenses labs. These labs focus on glasses and contact lenses and how to take measurements on them, fit them on patients, and even how to make them. I didn’t have much experience with glasses or contact lenses before I started optometry school, so I’ve learned a lot of important things in these labs. Our practicals in these labs usually consist of moving from station to station and taking different measurements on pairs of glasses or contact lenses. Next week we begin fitting rigid contact lenses on each other’s eyes which will be something new for a lot of us!
Our last series of labs that we are finishing up this semester is our Pediatrics/Vision Therapy labs. We took Pediatrics last semester and now we’re in Vision Therapy, but the two labs are set up in basically the same way. Each week we learn a new set of clinical skills in lab. Usually the skills we learn align pretty much perfectly with what we’re learning in class. We then perform all of the new skills on a partner in lab and take a quiz over them, then at the end of the semester we have a big final practical exam where we have to perform and talk about a few of the skills on our exam proctor! We don’t know which ones we’ll have to perform until we get there to take our exam, so it’s a good way to make sure we know and practice all of them.
All of these labs have a ton of clinical applications. We may just be doing these procedures on each other right now, but it won’t be long at all before we’ll be performing them on real patients. All of the practicing to perfect these new skills will pay off when we can see them in action in the clinic! Between the skills we learn in our labs and the knowledge we’re learning in our classes, we will be ready to go in The Eye Center this May. :-)