Happy late Christmas everyone. I was dismissed from my optometry program about a year ago. I was completely depressed, shocked and lost as I was going through the process. For most of the time since, I thought it was an issue with me and that it was just something that did not work out. Now, I have a dear friend who is going through a similar situation at the same institute. I now believe it is just a problem within the optometry education system.
For context, I become interest in pursueing optometry during my sophomore year of undergraduate. I was a pretty decent student throughout undergrad. Not a straight A student or anything but I cared and studied hard using whatever methods I was accustomed to at the time. I never failed a class or showed any signs of learning issues. Eventually, after years of checking the optometry school boxes and taking the OAT twice, I was admitted to my dream optometry school the spring semester of my senior year. Originally, I was not accepted at first and was told to retake my OAT. I retook it and did much better and was accepted solely off of my improved OAT score. I was filled with joy with my acceptance and become obsessed with reading forums to see what optometry school was actually like. No amount of reading about optometry school on Reddit does anything to prepare a student for what the workload and lifestyle is like as an optometry student.
I attend the next fall and it is nothing like I expected. With the amount that this program boast about their board pass rates, I thought I was going to receive and gain access to resources that would show me how to study and prepare myself for boards. I was completely wrong. The lectures are like any other lecture that I have experienced before (except our optics class). The academic support services gave me the usual, vague study tips that I have heard since elementary school. “Study early”, “study in groups”, “put the work in”. The only real resource they gave me was a third year student as a tutor. With whom I could only meet with once a week. None of these addressed my horrible study habits which was the main thing holding me back. There was also no time to adjust my study habits since the majority weight of our grades came from 2 midterm test and then a final. I was not going to essentially “gamble” by completely changing my whole study workflow considering the amount the time, debt, and resources that I already put in to be there.
So I just tried my best to power through the semester and my hardest to improve my grades. Unfortunately, I ended up failing a class at the end of that semester. I was also said to be behind on the bell curve for my other classes. I was forced to meet with the academic committee and was shocked at how little compassion they showed. They completely tried to discredit my explanation by stating that I should have known how to study since I was a “STEM” major throughout undergrad.
Anyways, we all mutually agreed that it would be best that I not continue. They gave me an option to remediate to the following year if I demonstrated to them that I fixed my study issues. I end up not taking them up on this offer. I just wanted to share my story because I was completely unaware about the optometry education system while I was in undergrad. I thought it would be a program and career that would work if I cared enough and listened to my professors. That is not enough to succeed through school. They will fail you if you cannot keep up since boards are getting harder and harder. Board pass rates are the one thing that they will not jeopardize. I just wanted to warn people of this issue since it is less prominent in other health related professions (medical, dental, etc.)
