It was a short trip to the Emerald City also known as Seattle but well worth! Optometry’s Meeting took it to the Pacific Northwest and it was wasn’t short on good times. Here are some of the the highlights:
Education
The usual excellent Continuing Education was available again this year covering all areas of optometry. New this year was a Custom Stable scleral lens fitting workshop. Students were broken up into 2 teams with each team tasked with fitting each other in the Scleral Lenses and then noting specific fitting characteristics for points. In the second half of the workshop, the teams had to answer questions about the Custom Stable lens, it’s properties, and how to fit them. At the end, the winning team received a gift bag with fine liquor, a shot glass, and a gift card to Starbucks.
Optometry Student Bowl
One obvious highlight of the conference was the annual student bowl featuring the finest student representatives from each optometry school. Spirit and creatively were in no short order as each school donned their most creative costumes from the ICO lumberjacks to the traditional school spirit costumes of Ohio State, Indiana, and Berkeley. The questions were tough and the competition was fierce but ultimately Nicole Rist of PCO came out on top with Pacific University winning the Spirit Award and Northeastern State Univerisity winning the Virtual Spirit Award. Congratulations to all of Student Bowl participants and winners!!
Other Student Specific Events
These events helped students to think more about their future careers including “Whats Your Practice Personality?” where doctors from different modes of practice discussed their experiences and gave honest answers to student questions. For attending this event, students were given tickets to go to Luxocitta Live at the Hard Rock Café for drinks and food along with excellent views of downtown Seattle. Another excellent event was the Residency Forum where residency directors from the various optometry schools across were available to discuss
Sights and Tastes of Seattle
When people were not sitting in on quality CE or attending awesome student events, they were exploring the great city of Seattle. My personal favorite was Pike Place Market with its unique sites such as the “gum wall,” smells such as freshly caught fish, flowers and lavender products, and tastes such as the Alaskan cod and homemade root beer I had while looking out over Puget Sound. I also made a quick stop at the Space Needle (as if a trip to Seattle would be complete without it)
Can you see why I didn’t sleep much?? I would highly encourage any student to attend these conferences. Not only does it provide you with great CE, networking opportunities, and camaraderie with your fellow optometrists and students, its an excellent way to break up the monotony of optometry school. See you at next year’s Optometry’s Meeting during Fourth of July weekend in Boston, MA!
