Optometry as an Informed Choice - Admission/Application Essay Example

? When I was considering my options for optometry school, I knew that I had to look for the school that offered the most on the job training or clinic hours for their students. This was something that I felt was imperative for any school I would be choosing to attend because Optometry, although also based upon theory and Science, is mostly considered to be a hands on job. The educational institution that offered the most clinic hours of all the schools in my list was SCCO which is why I proceeded to apply for admittance into your fine institution of academic learning. Clinical experience is of the utmost importance in this job because unlike other medical occupations wherein you find yourself constantly immersed in a world of learning offered by hospitals and other training avenues, Optometry is more of a private practice based job and therefore limits the kind of exposure immersion learning situations that I could be involved in. Which is why I was highly pleased to learn that SCCO offered an evenly divided learning schedule covering all aspects of Optometry theory and skills training. Unlike other schools, SCCO cares about whether their students actually learn what they are being trained to do in a balanced fashion. No one particular aspect of Optometry is given more attention or importance than the other. Even though SCCO is highly acclaimed for its cutting edge Optometry tools which they make available to students in training, the professors and mentors always make sure that the students are highly competent on the theory side before even letting them see the instruments to be used. However, the real reason I am excited about attending SCCO is the fact that I will be molded by notable names in the field of Optometry. It excites me to just think about working with the excellent school staff and the excellent opportunities that shall lie ahead for me once I complete my training with SCCO. I plan to display the best qualities that a student can display while I attend SCCO. I aim to become a Dean's Lister who is visibly devoted to my craft and the betterment of the SCCO student body in any way that I can. If it means becoming active in student extra curricular activities then I will do it. I am willing to go the extra mile in order to further enhance the image of SCCO as an exemplary educational institution. I do not plan on moving away from Southern California after completing my education. Instead, I am now making plans to further my education and expand my career as a future professor at SCCO. I am a big believer in giving back to my community and by becoming a professor at SCCO, I will be helping to prepare the future Optometrists of the world and paying back SCCO for the world class training that the school will have bestowed upon me by then. I shall hold myself to the highest possible academic standards. If possible, I aim to exceed the expectations of my professors and mentors in terms of grades and academic achievements. I plan to set the bar so high for the next batch of Optometrists in training at SCCO that my name shall become legendary and exemplary in the school. By accomplishing that, I shall have succeeded in redefining the characteristics of an typical SCCO student, carrying the name of my school proudly into the future. WESTERN OPTOMETRY As you can tell from my previously attached essay, my exposure and experience in the field of Optometry covers a maximum of 5 months experience. The reason behind this is that I was constantly switching careers in the field of medicine, trying to find the niche that was meant for me. However, I do not consider my short exposure to the field of Optometry to be a drawback because my combined field work exposure in a doctor's clinic and in the dentists office have also contributed to molding me into a healthcare professional. Each field that I was exposed to taught me something new and different regarding patient care, empathy, and professionalism. Therefore I will never take away any credit from those previous experiences even though those are not directly related to a career in Optometry. It has instead, opened my mind towards discovering a way so that I can take my mixed up training experience and make it result in something that will positively affect my learning and volunteer activities as a student. Each of my volunteer medical activities left me with a very valuable lesson pertaining to the way a medical professional affects a patient's life. We are seen as Miracle Workers because we give them hope when they think all is lost. We give them a new lease on life when they think that nothing more can be done to help them. We are the people who give their lives a new kind of normal. It is this new kind of normal that they are forever grateful to the medical professional for. Back when I was a student at UCLA, my classmates and professors often admitted to me that they held me in high regard because of my ambition. Hearing them describe my ambitious passion for anything I do often left me feeling warm inside. This was a personal quality that I personally nurtured and treasured. I was never daunted by any task set before me, even when others were already retreating from it thinking the task impossible to complete. Their weakness made me want to prove that I could accomplish something which they failed at. A clear example of the way that I never backed down from a task assigned to me can be seen by the way I was able to complete my AP courses while also taking numerous college credit classes at the local community college. While others thought I was banging my head on a brick wall and setting myself up for failure, I proved to them that time management solves all problems. If that is not enough to impress you then I ask you to consider this, my classmates had voted me as having “the most enthusiastic brain” due to my eagerness to learn. In my opinion there are no boundaries when it comes to learning for we are never fully educated, we continue to learn until the day we die. And that, my friends and professors will tell you, is what sets me apart from the crowd. My brain is like a sponge that absorbs everything it sees and is taught. It is constantly analyzing and observing, thinking of ways and means that I can make a difference in whatever activity I may be overly involved in at any given time. I guess that is why I enjoy learning so much. While other people claim that their brains are already cluttered with too much information gained from their time on the earth, I know that my brain still has plenty of room to spare when it comes to the learning processes. That is why I am always an eager student. That is why I lap up knowledge like a flowing stream of water. I will never be fully educated enough. Not for as long as there are college courses to take and master. Imagine if you will a person who was educated at small private schools for most of her life. It was a sheltered existence that was built around a strict schedule, leaving little time for other activities outside of the regular school schedule. That is the educational situation that I was in for most of my life. Yet I was able to still find a pocket of time in order to attend and complete several community college courses while completing my AP classes at the same time. I already thought that my time management skills were the best of the best because I was able to accomplish that much. But after I entered UCLA, I realized that what I had accomplished in high school was merely a footnote. The courses I took at UCLA were more demanding and difficult than any other courses that I had taken in the past. Contrary to what I believed about myself, I was not totally prepared for my college life. It turned out that the time management challenges I faced in high school were merely dry runs for what I had to go through in college. Over time I learned and had to readjust my time management skills to fit the needs of an intensely busy college student. The biggest test of my time management skills came during my first midterms and finals at UCLA. These exams in particular could actually be called Hell Week for most students. Most specially those who lacked time management skills. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been raised in a family that prides itself in being able to multitask and manage their time so efficiently that there were days when we actually had some extra time left to just laze around the house if we wanted to. Which is why I was often times the envy of my classmates during the days leading up to our major exams. While I was taking time to enjoy a cup of coffee at the local student village, there they were, cramming as much as they could into their brains while the clock did an apocalyptic countdown to exams for them. The reason why I was able to do this all boils down to the fact that I never developed the habit of procrastination. For as long as there was something I knew I had to do or learn, and the pocket of time existed for me to be able to attend to those lessons, assignments, or review guides, I would do it. In the end, all of my preparation really paid off when exam week rolled around. There were days when I had two or 4 midterms or finals scheduled on the same day. So I had to make sure that I had enough time to study for the exams while working at my part time job, and attending to my volunteer activities at the same time. It was literally physically and mentally draining on my part. But as the saying goes “When there is a will, there is a way” and I eventually found the right way to do things. If I had lacked the proper time management foresight and training, I would definitely have failed all those unforgiving exams at UCLA. Just like any normal student though, I needed time to get on steady footing and arrange my schedule in a workable manner. Although my grades suffered for for the first few quarters that I was attending UCLA, everything eventually settled down for me. I learned how to plan my schedule in an efficient manner so that each day of my week was productive and all my activities were evenly distributed so that not all my time was spent on academic activities. INDIANA OPTOMETRY (IUSO) I am what others may define to be a professional student. I have a strong passion for learning about anything and everything that interests me. This was a trait that my parents chose to nurture in me as a child by allowing me to enroll in summer learning camps, taking advanced AP classes when I was in high school, and finally, when I got to college, they helped me pay my tuition fee so that I could take advanced classed over the summer. I do not know what causes this unrelenting desire to learn as much as I can from both my academic, social, and private life. In my eyes, there is nothing that a person can do that will not leave him or her with a memorable lesson at the end of the day or session. It is this passion that has driven me to become competitive by nature. I am never satisfied until I can personally tell myself that I am already the best at what I set out to do. As a future graduate of Indiana Optometry, I plan to graduate in the top 10 percentile at the very least. I have truly set the bar high for myself in this case because I feel that Optometry is the medical profession, the niche that I was meant to fulfill. I may not have known it before, I may not have been ready to accept it before, but in the end, I came to realize where I would truly be happy and be able to effect a truly positive outcome in the lives of the people with whom I cross paths everyday. I realize that there are many qualified applicants for the student position and that I have to offer the admissions board something that no other student can offer if I am to be given an enrollment slot at this highly esteemed academic institution. What I offer the admissions board is a student who has an extensive track record of exposure and volunteer time in the medical and dentistry field. Although others may think that these 2 fields have no direct connection whatsoever with Optometry, I will beg to differ. Both fields allow for physical interactivity with the patients. Both medicine and dentistry require one to develop the skill of empathy for the suffering patient. In fact, Dentistry is highly similar to Optometry in the sense that the relief or cure for what ails the patient can actually be applied instantaneously by the health care practitioner, much to the delight of the patient. I will strive to continuously make the school board proud to call me a member of their student body by holding myself up to standards higher than what is normally expected of a student of this institution. I will consciously conduct myself in a manner befitting a student of Indiana University, remaining humble, kind, and rational every single day that I am a attending university there so that at the end of my educational stint, the school board will continue to remember that they once had a student by my name attend their institution. For my part, I will insure that everyone knows where I sharpened my Optometrist skills and recommend my alma mater every chance I get. It seems that I had unwittingly been preparing for a career in Optometry all along. It fully ties in with my degree in Sociology since my degree has given me unparalleled insight into the human mind and how social interaction can help patients become calmer and more responsive to treatment if conducted correctly. Additionally, Optometry will also allow me to use everything that I learned in Sociology, thereby giving me an extra edge over an ordinary Optometrist and making me the perfect candidate for Optometry School. Also, I have volunteered in different fields and Optometry is the only field that has stood out to me as the perfect profession, I am not experimenting with optometry, I am a 100% sure this is what I want. Optometry is a profession that completes me. It is an occupation which I feel passionately about which is why I am absolutely sure that I shall succeed in making waves in this field. Read More