I remember a while back, one of my computer graphics professors claimed that 90%+ of the population in the world needed some form of vision correction.
So it’s a good thing my girlfriend is going to be one of those people who’ll divine the fate of your eyes with a few letters, a light scope, and a few pieces of thin glass. Congrats to her, who just got accepted to the School of Optometry at Berkeley.
The path to an OD starts like most med-school-bound roads, probably back in high school somewhere. You wanted to help people out and make good money doing it, garner the respect of friends and family, and trot around a doctorate degree, so you decide that you’re going to stick to a biology or chemistry major (or in Berkeley, a MCB major).
You sit in lecture halls with 800 other people in your major, usually dozing off to the sounds of new and exciting Latin terms for body parts you didn’t know you had in you. Don’t worry, though – half the class is probably sharing your experience, and 2/3rd’s of them won’t get that minimal 3.5 GPA to go to grad school anyway.
By your sophomore year, you feel a bit more settled, so you begin to look for unpaid lab assistant positions to solidify that empty resume. You slave and slave for the damned place, staying overnight to obtain those lab results so that you’ll have the privilege of adding your name after 20 others on one of a few thousand papers published each year on that field of research. “One of these days”, you think to yourself, “I’m going to grab my letter of recommendation and burn the lab on my way out”.
Junior year, you’re beginning to hear about all those tests – the LSAT, MCAT, DINGBAT – stretching the limits of human endurance and frustration. By contrast, nobody has even heard of the OAT, and finding study material on the subject is the stuff of myths and legends. Wait…of course Kaplan has an $1000 8-week course on it.
Stopping for a moment to consider potential grad schools, you begin to realize it’s thin pickings out there. Apparently it only takes 3-4 quality schools in the United States to produce the Lenscrafters army, although it’s worth mentioning that opticans are the ones who talk to you buying $300 frames and usually only require only 2 years of post-high-school education. The schools are demanding: they want grades, friendly personalities, research and volunteer experience, and bright smiles (1).
You write the same entrance essay 15 times, and scatter your applications to the four winds.
And wait.
…
Then finally, on a day when you couldn’t wait for their call any longer, you call up the school and ask for the guy who interviewed you, and he congratulates you on a job well done, since you’re going to be staying in Berkeley for the next four years learning about the human eye, the one thing you truly wanted to do.
And you call your boyfriend and tell him the good news.
And he writes it all down, to share with the world.
- might as well help out fellow dentists (↩)