career change

[matumi99]

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i have been a teacher for 7 years now. i have a masters in school counseling from nova. but i have been very disappointed with the career for a long time. i’ve always liked optometry, but i never pursued it. now i’m 30 and pregnant, which i’m delighted about but unhappy with my career. i was planning to go back to community college to get all the sciences i need to get into the program and start taking the oat. i’m only going to apply to nova because i live in ft.lauderdale already and moving my family would be impossible. do you think having attended nova for my masters looks good on my resume?. do they look at age as a determining factor? how hard is optometry school? would i be able to handle being a mother, a wife, and a student? please any input is greatly appreciated. thanks.

 

[KHE]

i have been a teacher for 7 years now. i have a masters in school counseling from nova. but i have been very disappointed with the career for a long time. i've always liked optometry, but i never pursued it. now i'm 30 and pregnant, which i'm delighted about but unhappy with my career. i was planning to go back to community college to get all the sciences i need to get into the program and start taking the oat. i'm only going to apply to nova because i live in ft.lauderdale already and moving my family would be impossible. do you think having attended nova for my masters looks good on my resume?. do they look at age as a determining factor? how hard is optometry school? would i be able to handle being a mother, a wife, and a student? please any input is greatly appreciated. thanks.

I left optometry to become a teacher.....what is it that you aren't enjoying about teaching?

Also....your other questions seem to suggest to me, as an outsider that you haven't really given this much thought. When you say you "always liked optometry" what did you like about it? How far along in this process are you?

Why did you switch away from pursuing pharmacy?

 

[matumi99]

some of the things that have turned me off about teaching are the stress of dealing with the bad mannered students. now days parents are so busy working they don't attend to their children like they used to. if you are a teacher you know how easily it is to get burned out after a couple of years. the benefits are terrible. at least in fl you only retire with 40% of your salary so there are a lot of teachers out there who are in their 60's who can't afford to retire. the low pay is also very disappointing for all the extra work you do. i end up working summers and after school to cope with how expensive everything is getting in south florida. and finally is scary to think how will the profession be in 10, 20, 30 years from now with all this violence. i work in a good school and so far this year we've had two students arrested for drugs and one incident where they had to lock down the school for a student being on the loose. thankfully it was nothing, but is scary to think i'm going to be doing this for the rest of my professional life.

i've been thinking about optometry for a long time. about 5 years ago my husband had a cornea transplant and since then i've been spending a lot of time with his optometrist, who is a really good friend of my father in-law. i've gotten to ask him questions and have been able to shadow him a couple of times and i really enjoyed it. of course i like the pay, but most of all i like the patient interaction.

a really good friend of mine got into pharmacy school abut two years ago and she was encouraging me to go in with her. i liked the idea of changing careers to a medical field which i enjoy, but i got turned off by their schedule and it seemed a little boring just dealing with pills the whole day with hardly no patient interaction.

i hope this gives you a little more information on why i want to go into the profession and why i want to leave teaching. thanks.

 

[RegularGuy]

Hi there,

I'm not sure if having a masters from Nova will give you a big boost on your application. However, it certainly can't hurt! I think your experiences will help to positively distinguish yourself from other students. IMHO, one of the major ways optometrists help people is by teaching.

I'm also an older, nontraditional student. I was once rejected from a postbac program because my school (big public school) wasn't sure if I could handle the coursework after not going to school for 8 years. (I took 2 science courses as a non-matriculated student and got A's in both of them. Then, I reapplied and got in.)

Based on what the admissions team told me, being older doesn't really help or hurt you. Older people like us either 1) Break the curve because we're more mature and focused or 2) Can't handle the work because we've got other responsibilities or haven't been in academia for a long time. Either way, being older has factors that produce good students or poor students. (Just like normal younger students!)

So you'll still have to show the admissions team that you're smart, capable of handling your many responsibilities and will bring something positive to the school. IMHO, if you're able to do well in the prerequisite courses, take care of a newborn, and manage a family you're pretty much capable of making it through optometry school.

Good luck!

 

[RegularGuy]

BTW, I know that some schools look down on courses taken at community colleges. The Berkeley admissions team told me that if I took the basic science prereqs from community college courses, it would detract from the strength of my application. (They're ok with taking non-science pre-req courses there, though.)