You might be in Iowa if...

So, if you read my last post (or you're on Facebook) you know I'm in Iowa visiting family and friends and will be here for the next week still.

So while I'm up here, I thought I would do more of a fun post instead of blabbing on about whatever is currently going on.

Instead, I will be kind of making a list of things I've seen in Iowa so far.

So here we go:

• If deer consistently want to jump out in front of your car whenever you go somewhere, you're probably in Iowa. 
• If you consistently see dead deer on the side of the road and it doesn't phase you, you're probably in Iowa. 
• If your grandmother has plenty of farm kittens running around the country house and they always seem to be multiplying, you're probably in Iowa. 
• If the raccoon family makes a daily appearance at the cat food bowl and stares at you through the window while they eat, you're probably in Iowa. 
• If your idea of a good time is spending the day at the county fair, you might be in Iowa. 
• If you enjoy watching people play real life bumper cars in the mud (demo derby), you might be in Iowa. 
• If you run out of the sun room so your grandpa can kill 4 or 5 wasps that made their way in there, you might be in Iowa. 
• If a lot of people give you the casual 2 finger wave while driving past them in the opposite direction on the county highways, you might be in Iowa. 
• If it's a common occurrence to get stuck behind a tractor on the highway for a few minutes, you might be in Iowa. 
• If you help cook and freeze 46 pints of sweet corn for your grandparents, you might be in Iowa. 
• If you're used to sweating after 10 minutes of being outside due to the humidity, you might be in Iowa. 
• If you see green EVERYWHERE, you might be in Iowa. 

I've been here for just over a week now and plan to be leaving next Wednesday. If I come up with any others, I will probably update this post.

Until then, have a good week :)

Before Arizona

This week, I'm writing from the great state of Iowa. I flew up here on Wednesday (which is a whole other story itself, since the first flight was delayed four hours and making me miss the second connecting flight) and got here about 5 in the afternoon. The last 20 minutes of the plane ride, I just spent watching out the window at all the green farm fields. It'd been 3 years since the last time I was up here.

For those that know me, you probably know I wasn't always an Arizona girl. Right before I started 7th grade, we found out that we'd be moving to Arizona for my dad's job so that he could work out of Winslow, Arizona. So midway through the school year, we moved in January of 2004. It was -4 degrees in the morning that we left with a -15 to -20 degree windchill. By the time we made it to Arizona the next day, they were having nice weather and it was somewhere in the 60s. That was probably the nicest part of the move.

I was born in Greenfield, Iowa and had lived in the same house ever since. We lived in a house out in the country 5 miles from town. We lived just a mile down the road from my grandparents (whose house I'm staying at now) and 3 quarters of a mile away from my uncle's and his family's house. We left lots of relatives (from both sides of the family) here in Iowa who are all still here, so its fun to come and visit for a few weeks every once in a while.

I think it was a hard move for all of us, but at the time, it was the best for my dad's job and allowed him to be home so we could see him a lot more. Regardless, it took probably over a year for me to get used to where we were. I'd been used to green and rolling hills all my life. I knew everyone in my class in Iowa as well as the rest of the whole school. So when I got picked up and moved to Arizona, the land was brown and had little vegetation and my school was 3 times the size of what I was used to (even though is still considered small by today's standards) and even to the day I graduated high school, I probably only knew the names of one tenth of the school.

I think a lot of it was culture shock. Once I finally got to high school and out of junior high, I was a lot happier in Arizona. Part of that was probably due to being a part of the several choirs and bands there and finally sort of having a "place" where I felt I belonged. I also really liked having all of the AP classes available and getting to know my classmates since we all tended to be in the same AP classes.

I guess to make this post "optometry" related, I will mention that the night I got here, my grandma mentioned she had an eye doctor appointment the next morning and wanted to know if I wanted to accompany her. Since she sees the same optometrist that I saw as a kid when I lived, here, I didn't hesitate to say yes.

So yesterday, I sat in on her appointment and got to talk to my old optometrist and had a lot of fun asking her questions after I'd told her what my plans were for the fall. Additionally, I even got to see my grandma's slight cataracts through the slit lamp as well as the optic nerves in the back of her eyes with another machine.

For now, I'm enjoying not having any responsibilities and seeing as many family members and people as I can up here in Iowa. Getting to see my old class mates and catch up is always fun too. Seeing as I have almost exactly a month left until orientation at my new school, I should probably use this time to relax as much as possible. :)

The night we got here, a mama raccoon and 2 of her half grown babies showed up to eat the cat food and food scraps in the back yard. We had fun watching them from her sun room windows. 

 

Previous Life as an Undergrad

So, seeing as I graduated two months ago (wow, that long already?), I thought I would talk about what I spent the last four years doing in school. Here we go.

For those of you that don't know, I did my undergrad at the University of Arizona, located in Tucson, for all four years. I received my Bachelor's of Science in Health Sciences with a major in Physiology - the only undergraduate major to be offered through U of A's College of Medicine. With that said, I had some pretty amazing professors...but the curriculum was no walk in the park.

2 semesters of calculus, 2 semesters of biology, 2 semesters of chemistry, 2 semesters of organic chemistry, 2 semesters of physics, 2 semesters of anatomy and physiology, 2 semesters of integrated cellular physiology...are you starting to get the picture? And there's more...but that's kind of boring to read through. (If you're really interested, here's a direct link to the PDF that has my entire major's curriculum:  http://physiology.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/psiocurric1213.pdf)

Now the way a lot of "medical profession" programs work (medical school, pharmacy school, dental school, optometry, etc.), you will generally have to complete some sort of bachelor's degree in order to apply. Generally, it doesn't really matter what your bachelor's degree is in, but they will most likely have a list of prerequisite courses that you need to have completed.

So basically...you can major in whatever you want, but you have to have those classes done by the time you apply. So...for those who know they want to go on to pursue that type of profession, they will get a bachelor's degree whose curriculum already contains many of the prerequisites to complete (killing 2 birds with 1 stone).

So for example...here is a screen shot of my school's prerequisites that I needed to have done.

Look familiar? The only courses that weren't included in my major were microbiology and statistics. Fortunately, I had already completed those my first two years when I was originally a pre-nursing major. So...that actually worked out pretty well.





The way all of my classes ran were pretty similar. With my major, the majority of my classes were all science classes with lots of memorization. We had a special website created by the school that allowed us to have a "webpage" for each specific class that we took. It was here that we could see announcements the teachers posted (such as a delay to an assignment due date), as well as download powerpoint lectures that the professors used in class (which is pretty much what all my professors used).

Here's a screenshot of my classes from the spring. Each blue link was for each class (labs included). I had four classes and two labs - each separated by what department they were in. This made is super easy to download a powerpoint to take notes on in class and then refer back to when I was studying for an exam.

Additionally, teachers could also post quizzes on this website that we would have to complete for a grade...usually with a deadline. So if you forgot about it, it wouldn't allow you to take it any longer. The same went for turning assignments or papers in. Each class had a "dropbox" that we would upload our papers to and then submit electronically. I think I only had a few classes where we actually had to turn paper copies of assignments into the teacher in the classroom. This way, less paper wasted and the computer could also screen any paper for plagiarism. Pretty handy.

So, after four years of that, here I am. I graduated and got to sit through a pretty awesome ceremony that the University put on for us.

Here's a youtube video of the finale :)

Left: The bracelets they gave to us that lit up about half way through that video.

Right: And one last piece of memorabilia that I created with my graduation cap. I think it turned out pretty good and I can't wait to hang it in my new place :)

I hope all of you had a good week! Next week, I will be in Iowa visiting family and friends, but I will try to write another post next Friday (for anyone who wants to read it).

Until then, have a good next week :)

First Entry: What is all of this?

Greetings,

Okay, so I did it. I finally decided to step into the blogging world. Why? Because I've been thinking about it for a while but never really had any ideas to blog about.

Well now, I have something (semi) interesting to blog about. In about a month and a half, I will be starting the next step of my educational career and begin grad school - optometry school, if you want to be even more specific. This will be an entirely different ball game, but I feel like it will be interesting to reflect back on in 5 to 10 years when it is all over.

So this is my first post, right? So this is where I'm supposed to say something witty and clever to make you (and whoever else decides to read this) keep coming back, right? Well...I'm still working on that.

No, in all honesty, I'm doing this to keep my family members and friends updated on what's happening in my life. And if you are neither of those, well then that's cool too.

But, since this IS my first entry, I may as well give it a topic (because topics aren't exactly my forte, so it might not happen again). So this entry's topic is: Why Optometry?

I'm glad you asked. Well for starters, I've been going to the optometrist at least once a year since I was in kindergarten. I remember being four or five years old and standing on one end of the living room and telling my parents that the numbers on the clock on the other end of the room were blurry (which I'm pretty sure they probably just thought I was making up to get glasses), but it was true. Probably around a quarter way into the school year (1997), all the kids had to do vision tests in the nurses office and I had a note sent home after mine was done.

Surprise Mom and Dad. Your daughter is actually having trouble seeing.

So that's where it started. I got my first pair of glasses. I wore them to school and got called four-eyes all week...which honestly didn't bother me for one of two reasons. 1: I thought they were so cool and was young enough to not care what they said or 2: I probably thought they were jealous of them...which they probably were.

From there on, my eyes got worse. In second grade, I had lined bifocals put on my glasses (I really don't remember the reason why). In third grade, we determined the bifocals weren't helping, so the bifocals came off. By fourth grade, my eyes were progressively getting A LOT worse - to the point where I got my first pair of gas permeable (hard) contact lenses that I started wearing full time. I had just turned nine years old.

By the time sixth grade rolled around, I was going to need soft contact lenses with all the sports I was playing and we found out that my eyes were still rapidly changing even with wearing the hard contact lenses. So...I switched to soft lenses full time and was SOOO much happier (if you've ever worn hard contacts out in the dusty country of Iowa, then you know why) My eyes still changed really fast. Every year I went to get a physical for school, they told me I needed to have my eyes checked when in reality, it had been LESS than a year since my last eye exam. Fortunately, I've always had access to contacts and glasses.

And that brings me to where I'm at now. I'm 21 (22 in a few months) and unless you've ever seen how thick my glasses are, you'd never have known I had any vision problems at all because I am basically required to wear my contacts full time (for things like driving and anything else requiring more than a 50 feet viewing distance).

For those of you that are familiar with how prescriptions work, this is my most recent one I received while still working at LensCrafters so I could get my new glasses.

	SPH	CYL	AXIS
OD	-15.50	-2.00	167
OS	-15.00	-2.00	008

OR, if we wanted to write in plus CYL form (or how ophthalmologists would write it)

	SPH	CYL	AXIS
OD	-17.50	+2.00	077
OS	-17.00	+2.00	098

And if any of that means nothing to you, basically I am very very near sighted (which means I can't see things far away) with a mild astigmatism (which is a fancy word for saying my eyes aren't perfectly round like a basketball). In order to see or read anything without glasses or contacts, it has to be around 6 cm in front of my eyes...which is what I calculated it out to back when I was learning optics in physics at U of A. So...that's no exaggeration. It's a legit number. 

Now, that you know my whole life story (not really), that is only part of the reason why I was interested in the field of optometry. After shadowing several different optometrists and seeing what the field has to offer, I became even more interested. And then after working at LensCrafters for a year and seeing first hand how great it is to help people out by clearing up their sight, I was very sure behind making my decision.

So that's how I ended up here. I will try to do weekly posts from now on (even though school doesn't start for another month and a half), but I figure I can come up with some other optometry/life related topics to talk about then. I'm pretty sure they won't be as long as this one.

Until then, have a good rest of your week :)

Optometry Fact (Basic, since I haven't learned much yet)
I have entitled the name of this blog Behind Blue, Myopic Eyes...for a couple of reasons.
1. Behind Blue Eyes is a good (and interesting) song
2. I literally do have really blue eyes
3. Myopic is a term that means nearsighted (which I am, as described above)
4. It works as the name of an optometry student blog...for now anyways... :)