Saturday 7 June 2014

End of second year musings

So walked out of final exam on Tuesday and it felt like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. The first years looked a little confused as to what had just happened, but that's normal after a dispensing exam whilst the third years were a mixture of elated that they had finished and disbelief that they had finished.

Library books went back on Thursday and it was time to relax for a little while before I start my summer placements on Monday - no rest for the wicked. I'm doing two placements with Boots first and then Specsavers so it will be interesting to see how the two compare.


So what have I learned over the last year:

Contact lenses are interesting, the materials aren't that much fun (although tours round factories are) but there is so much you can do with them to help patients in a slightly different way from normal spectacle use. There is a big market out there that can really help businesses but at the same time there are risks that need to be managed.

Pharmacology offers a lot of further training paths that I may well want to explore later on in my career but there is a lot to learn for exams about drugs, doses, uses, contraindications, side effects... This made it one of the most engaging courses of the year but also one of the scariest exams.

Binocular vision really isn't that scary, maybe it's because one of my friends has a squint so I am so used to testing them that it doesn't throw me off from usual routine. Yes there are a lot of conditions that need to be managed especially in young children but if you know the risks you know what needs to be done.

Neurophysiology is a bit of an odd one, whilst I can see the uses of some of it in practice particularly the links with visual fields and agnosias, not sure how much of it I will use in future, likewise with perception.

Colour vision seems to be remarkably easy, and visual fields is useful. The main thing to remember from visual fields is that the answer isn't always glaucoma but there is a pretty good chance it is.

So lots to take forward and look forward to starting third year in a few months. Now just need to go back to waiting for exam results. Fingers crossed.

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