Chapter 74

My third year in Optometry actually started off quite nicely. In fall term, I was doing acapella and school. That was it. Nothing else was happening and that worked just fine for me. The balance I had achieved worked fine. What’s more was that in third year optometry, we were now in the clinic a lot more and got interactions with real patients. These were the parts of optometry I really liked. The parts where we actually worked in an environment similar to our future career. 

Another thing that happened in third year was that LP and I had decided to room together. Remember how I said he would get into the Optom program the year after? Well, since we were both in the same program and went to the same school we figured why not? I mean we did live together in undergrad and were very familiar with each other’s living habits. 

Our choice of residence this year was CLV or Columbia Lake Village. This was considered on-campus housing just like in undergrad. Unlike in undergrad, we were now considered graduate students and were placed in a housing complex that was separate from the undergrads. 

On Campus residence for undergrad and for grad students were quite different. In our area, there were playgrounds and larger houses that housed only 2 residents. It was catered towards the vast differences in age you may expect from the graduate school program students. While some graduate students were as young as a recent graduate from an undergrad program, others were in their mid forties and had kids. 

We didn’t care to pay that much mind to it. The only fact that mattered to us was that our new residence, though a bit on the pricey side of around $850 a month, was a house for just two people. We didn’t have to share anything with anyone else. Imagine that. An entire house was left to LP and I. All those years we spent cooped up in a small apartment with only enough space for a single bed and a table contrasted drastically with the 2 story house + basement we now lived in.

The other benefit of living on campus? Our lease was only for 8 months. We didn’t have to find a sublet for the summer to fill in our spot. When it was time for school to end, it just ended and we could leave. 

With things going so smoothly, the fall term came and went without any trouble at all. I was happy and having a blast. When the finals went, I felt good. I had prepared enough and did enough reviewing that when I walked into the exam, I didn’t get much anxiety. Afterwards? I felt a bit anxious. I mean this was the first term post failing that course but overall, I was confident enough that I think I would’ve done okay. Sure enough, I had passed all my courses and we were good. 

Fall was so smooth that I felt hopeful for the future. I had one term left. Just one. 8 more courses and I was done. This was the finish line and then, it was no more courses, just some mandatory internship rotations for a year. That meant after my courses were done in winter, it would just be clinic time and therefore, no more tests. Well… No more tests until the board exams at least. 

Unfortunately, in direct contrast to my optimism, the winter term ahead would prove to be the worst term that I have ever had. It was so bad that even years later, I still feel the horrors that transpired during this term. 

Now, before we go any further. I do have to state a few things. In the next few chapters. There’s going to be some missing information. That is to say, some information will be intentionally omitted. Why is this? Well. Just to give you a hint at what’s to come, let’s just say that I am going to butt heads with the optometry administration a few times. During this next rocky period of time, I would form allies and enemies in the optometry faculty. 

Some of those allies of mine are still in the optometry faculty and it’s mainly for their sake that I’m going to censor some of the facts. In the VERY UNLIKELY chance that this blog ever hits it big, I don’t want any information I say in this blog to ruin their lives. Furthermore, I am confident that I can express to you the important bits that happen to me without going too much into that detail. 

As you can imagine, stating the fact that I would form allies and enemies in the next little bit implies that there would be some discourse in the optometry faculty. Some of the faculty would be on my side and some would not be. The important thing to note is that there were opposing sides to the story. The optometry faculty was not a united front. There was chaos and anxiety. People were looking over their shoulders. 

How did all of that come to be? Well… It’s hard to say. A lot of this is on the hush-hush. However, I can tell you that right from the start of the winter term, the optometry faculty was already having trouble. Although, at this time, it wasn’t an internal scuffle yet. It was mostly still a functional single-minded body, trying its best to make sense of how for the first time in over a decade, two students had needed to redo a year because of failing some courses. 

If I had to pinpoint where the discourse for everything started, I’d say that this was when the truth was leaked about the first years who needed to repeat a year. When that happened, the school panicked. There were three reasons for why this and they all revolved around the theme of responsibility. I saw these reasons with a “bad and ugly” narrative in mind.

Reason 1: The Bad

• Having students fail in year 1 reflected badly on the applications committee. After all, they had let the students into the school. Waterloo, being the one English speaking optometry school in Canada, had no shortage of applicants. So it wasn’t the applicants, it was the committee’s judgment.

Reason 1: The Ugly

• The admissions committee had changed the method of interview within the last four years. When I got into the program, we did MMI (multiple mini interviews). When LP got into the program, he did the CASPER process. The school had its reasons for doing the change but regardless, the change to CASPER was a variable to consider when thinking about who the committee let into the school.

Reason 1: The Conversation (summary)

• “The school decided on a change in the interview process around 2 years ago and now first years are failing out of year one of the program. Seems like the school screwed up their selection process, which used to work just fine.”

Reason 2: The Bad

• There was a curriculum change which actually directly affected the first years in question. Remember how I said things were changing because of all the negative reviews of certain courses? Well… Yeah… That was happening. The freshmen generations after us were bombarded with curriculum changes, course overhauls and schedule readjustments. I even recall one class that was simultaneously taken by the third years as well as the first years. It was easy to follow the train of thought from there. If the curriculum changed in a negative way, it may explain why the first years failed.

Reason 2: The Ugly

• For the entire term when the first years had experienced the new curriculum, they had complained. There were various times when they got into heated arguments with the professors about the nature of their courses. Unfortunately, I do not know the exact nature of the conversations since, once again, I had gone through the system under the old curriculum. However, the main issue here was that there were signs. People were complaining. It’s hard to say who was right and who was wrong because the thing that makes it ugly? Since it seems there were preemptive signs that something has gone wrong, this added fuel to both sides. Students would blame the school for not acknowledging their feedback on how they said the new curriculum seems unfair and the school would fire back stating that the students, understanding that the courses they took were hard, should have tried harder for the exam. 

Reason 2: The Conversation (summary)

• “The school has changed the curriculum. The students introduced to this new curriculum seem to have responded negatively to it. Maybe this was the reason for the failures?”

Reason 3: The Bad

• The school is supposed to supply an entire country with a consistent 90 optometrists a year. A few first years not following the trend meant that there would be 1 year where the country will be short 2 new doctors. At gross examination, this doesn’t seem like a big deal. However, when you consider the fact that there are optometrists who work in very rural areas where one eye clinic is providing care for hundreds of thousands, sometimes the numbers do matter. 

Reason 3: The Ugly 

• This was a micro issue. The macro version of this problem? Canada only has one optometry school. Let’s say that it wasn’t just 2 repeating students but a lot more. What happens then? The country still needs optometrists and if Waterloo having a monopoly over English speaking domestically trained optometrists is somewhat of a power imbalance. There was too much riding on just one school with a class size of 90. There were workarounds to this but those were not good options in the eyes of the Canadian optometrist societies. That’s because any options for making up the difference in what Waterloo is unable to pump out revolves around international bridging program graduates and US Optometry School graduates. Both of which are threats towards the Canadian optometry field by themselves.

Reason 3: The Conversation (summary)

• “If Waterloo’s ability to pump out a steady stream of optometrists is in question, perhaps we should consider the possibility of having more than one English speaking optometry school in our country?”

With all these things considered, who’s to blame for the situation that was currently going on? How much of this was the freshmen’s fault and how much was it because of the school changing environment? My answer is: I don’t know. I guess only time will tell. I suppose if nothing else, this proves that the Canadian system can change easier than the US. By this I am referring to the fact that even when we screw up changes and alterations in our curriculum, the students have the forgiving option of retaking the year to still eventually graduate. Say what you will about the Waterloo Optometry program but at the very least, it won’t leave you in life-crushing debt when they change things around and people fail courses.

If any US optometry schools decided to change the curriculum around and found out 2 students failed in the first year for the first time in over a decade. Those two probably would have lost their futures and the school probably would have been sued ten times over. 

Now, when I first discussed this topic with some of my colleagues, there was always one conversation that kept coming up. If you’ve read all of this chapter so far and are a part of the optometry world, you may have even been thinking this the entire time as I went about those three reasons on why the school was panicking. You may be thinking:

None of these reasons are true.

And here’s the thing, you may be right. I included the last section (The Conversation) because in truth, these were some of the conversations I heard while I was in school. But then that leads into the next question. If some of this may just be speculation, why discuss it at all? To that I say… It’s because both outcomes of these speculations are worthwhile to talk about. 

If these speculations are true and the school was actually worried about it, then the school and the students need to have a conversation. There’s a lot to work out if we want to keep the Waterloo system alive and well. There are points in the bad and the ugly that should be discussed openly. We are in the Canadian optometry system where the group is small enough that we can have these kinds of discussions. Why not do it? There will be growing pains, sure. But is it not better to discuss it than risk Waterloo turning into USO (see previous chapter). 

If these speculations are false and the school is not worried at all, then what the hell is the school doing? They are changing curriculums and for the first time in decades students have failed. What’s happened? If they don’t care, then we need to talk about why they don’t. 

As you can see, things were happening. Some would say the school cares and others would say they don’t. I don’t want to give you the impression that there were riots everywhere with pitchforks though. These things were happening mainly in the background. They will get worse, but we aren’t there yet. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. These are just seeds of discourse and to be honest, it didn’t garner that much attention to everyone. 

In all fairness, I am writing this in such a concise way only because I have the benefit of hindsight on my side. I know what’s going to happen soon. With that information, it’s easy to trace back how things started. 

If you had asked me when I was in school about all of this, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you anything. That’s because while the school was going through all of this, I had my own problems. 

I had thought that failing in my second year of optometry would have been the worst thing that would ever happen to me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. There would be way more obstacles ahead of me. Some of which would bring me lower than I ever sunk before.