What next?!

The academic year has now come to a close- but what next for student and pre-reg optometrists? I explore some of the issues that students are facing right now with Rohan Fletcher at iseekrecruitment. You can find the latest article here!

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For all students I imagine walking into the lecture hall has now become a somewhat distant memory, we’re living in a dystopian fantasy of sinister masks and social distancing. The coronavirus is here to stay and this is transforming the way in which we learn and are assessed – but how has this affected us and what will happen next?

Looking forward to September 2020, new and returning students will be used to face to face learning, the given structure of a set timetable, a place to be and the ability to access learning material such as the library. This, on the most part, will no longer be present casting a shadow of unfamiliarity for all. For some, this will be fantastic, as they will be able to plan and manage their own schedule but without access to a physical campus means some will lose a place to study. Disadvantaged students will lose access to technology whereas some may simply not take to this new blended learning approach. This change will be particularly stark for recent A-Level students having had 7 months out of education further being compounded with the usual University transitional anxiety.

Having not long completed my first year at Aston University, I’ve experienced this new adapted approach. From March practical sessions were quickly cancelled soon followed by assessments and lecturers found new ways to assess our competency. I found the use of virtual patient simulator’s particularly intriguing for techniques such as retinoscopy and fan and block. Whilst laboratory experiments were converted into online tutorial tasks. Fortuitously, students only missed out on three weeks of teaching, which were adapted to recorded online lectures. End of year examinations, which contribute 85% of the year mark at my university, suddenly became open-book! I won’t lie, this came as a big shock because this also meant that traditional recall questions would be replaced with patient case studies involving more application based knowledge. Despite this, for me personally, I preferred this because it helped me to develop insight from a practitioner’s point of view while thinking about a patient holistically.

All students, now that exams are finished are stuck with the prospect of cancelled summer placements, lack of summer jobs to help fund the next academic year, delayed pre-registration posts and potential redundancies as firms strive to make ends meet. Students who work part-time as an Optical Assistant in practice and are lucky enough to be called back will return to an entirely changed dynamic with strict new infection-control protocols in place. The only solace being that we are all collectively in the same boat. Second year students moving into their third year, have been enrolling on unique “virtual summer placements” but all will agree this doesn’t quite match the real thing.

With most universities now confirming that online teaching will be here to stay until January 2021 at the earliest, courses like Optometry - which are highly practical in nature – raise a question on how we will learn for example slit-lamp techniques which require close contact or seeing real life patients in third year clinics. For now, there is a big question mark – but as government advice changes time will only tell. To answer some of these questions I worked as part of the Association of Optometrists student representative committee to put questions to the experts which can be seen in the article linked below:

https://www.aop.org.uk/ot/in-practice/career-development/2020/06/08/students-and-prereg-optometrists-in-lockdown-ot-coronavirus-guide