Hey everyone!
It’s hard to believe I’m coming to the end of my second year! It seems like we were just sitting through our first-year orientation, and now we’re already getting ready for our clinic orientation in a few weeks.
For me, this semester has been mostly about honing my clinical skills and preparing to enter clinic. We’ve finally learned the last skills that we need to complete a comprehensive exam, which is pretty exciting. Last month, my classmates and I all had to pass a pre-clinic checkout, in which we had to simulate an entire exam in 50 minutes. Now that we’ve passed those, we are officially cleared to start seeing patients in clinic!
While our course load this semester has been as challenging as ever, I feel like we’re starting to see how things come together and are related to one another. It’s been neat to learn about a particular disease in Posterior Segment class, then learn about how to treat it in Ocular Pharmacology. I feel like all of our professors have done a good job correlating and integrating information from our other classes and I’m hoping that will help us in clinic.
When the semester is over in two weeks, I will head home to Pennsylvania for some much needed family time for about ten days, during which I’m hoping to get a few days of shadowing/working in at my local eye clinic. Then I’ll return in mid-May to officially start my 3rd year! I am definitely excited to be done with second year, and to be officially halfway done with optometry school, but I’m also nervous to start applying all of this classroom information to real patients and real exams in clinic.
Stay tuned to hear about my clinic adventures in a few weeks, and I promise to talk about some summertime Memphis activities! It will be my first summer here, so I’m excited to see what the city has in store for me!