What are my chances?

[DMR2001]

Hi everyone! I recently graduated with a Bachelors in Biology. During my time in college, I classified myself as pre-health and learned as much as I could about all the possible careers within healthcare. Recently, I have been more drawn to optometry and was wondering what my chances would be. I took the MCAT in August of this year and scored a 502. My undergraduate GPA is 3.65 and my science GPA is 3.5. I have been a medical assistant for about 2.5 years now and I am also an Adjunct Lecturer for Genetics and Human Biology. I am currently looking for shadowing opportunities with an optometrist. Would I stand a fair chance if I apply this cycle? I know it is a little late in the cycle.

Thanks for all the help!

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[Mr.Smile12]

Welcome to the forums!

One resource you should access is our SDN Admissions Guide: How to Get Into Optometry School. It covers basics that you should review before going forward with an application. For anyone: let us know if there needs to be any changes.

The main thing to do is to get a lot more experience in optometry to be sure you want to make the switch. Chances are you have a ton of clinical experience for a medical school application (lots of hospital experience), so you must show similar interest in optometry (hours and insights). There are free clinics that may need volunteers to help others with vision problems, but you need to ultimately embed yourself with the challenges that low-vision individuals have in navigating our world and what resources are available.

In short, get your hours so you know it's worth the prep hours for the OAT and the OptomCAS application process.