How hard is the optics class in optometry school?

[Pre-optometry student]

Hi, I am about to start optometry school but I am terrible at physics and not that great at math either. I am worried that I will struggle in optometry school because of this. How difficult are the physics classes that you take in optometry school? And how difficult is optometry school overall compared to undergrad?

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[Ab2749]

from current students i heard it is pretty challenging and requires a lot of studying and practice

 

[Snakedoctor1]

Hi, I am about to start optometry school but I am terrible at physics and not that great at math either. I am worried that I will struggle in optometry school because of this. How difficult are the physics classes that you take in optometry school? And how difficult is optometry school overall compared to undergrad?

It will be different for everyone. The science courses at my undergrad were very difficult, more so than Optometry school overall. What makes Optometry school challenging is the shear quantity of information. I'm not a math whiz either, just study and you'll do fine.

 

[generallyspeaking]

Optics has a learning curve because it is something you've probably never encountered (even if you did a week or chapter in optics in high school physics, I would doubt it was taught using diopters instead of linear measurements like meters). I was thoroughly confused as a first year, and felt like I flushed it out of my head over my summer break, but as an upperclassman, I realized how pretty easy it is. Maybe I disagreed with how it was taught and learned it better myself (I tutored the course), but it is actually easy and is one of the things that I feel total control over with almost little usage of memorization possible. It is pretty easy, and the level of math involved is 7th grade algebra. It is easy but requires a learning curve, kind of like calculus. The general consensus at my school was that it was an easy class unless the teacher sucked (but the material is easy, and I actually think are freebie points on boards)

 

[Groucho Marx]

Try not to let the course intimidate you. Your school should give ample practice problems. Work them out on paper, and don't just read through the problems and solutions. If you aren't doing well after the first few assessments, then you could try to ask a professor for additional practice sets. Like the previous poster said, there is a bit of a learning curve, but it's really fairly formulaic.

Treat optometry school like your full time job because it is. It's much more memory based than undergrad, in my opinion. You'll have a lot of information to take in, but if you're consistent with studying every day (or almost), then it's manageable. Yes, it will be stressful, and at times you'll think the course load is impossible, but it's really not. I did pretty well academically when I was in school, but I still found time to do things that I liked by trying to break everything into manageable chunks.

 

[kh93]

I was never very good at physics in undergrad, but I found optics to be fairly easy! It helped that our professor was great at school and really made the topic fun. The best way to learn is to do as many practice problems as possible. If you understand the logic behind the problems, you should be able to solve anything you're given. The lovely thing about optics is it always follows the same rules so once you grasp the concepts you can manipulate different variables with ease!

 

[Eyeknow19]

If you're bad at math and physics, it will be hard for you. Don't wait to get a tutor. 1/3 of my class was failing and my professor had to curve the final, although several still failed with the curve.