My name is Monique Mohammed I'm a senior at Adelphi University
my name is Giselle Malave I go to school at St. Francis College
my name is Matthew Meyers I go to Cornell University
I'm Rebecca Kihei and I attend St. John's University
my name is a Marcus Aceveda and I go to New York University
my name is Alyssa Mendez and I go to the College of Staten Island
so this is the C-STEP winter internship
program and it's our exposure program to get undergraduate students who are
minorities or economically disadvantaged students an opportunity to come to the
University Eye Center and work with the doctors work with our students and see
the patients so that they can figure out if optometry something for them I think
having them come here and see first hand what it is that optometrists actually do
is one of the main goals
I'm really involved with C-STEP at my school so
the director told me about the program and then I did further research on the
website to find out about it
I would have to say I've been interested in the
field of optometry for quite some time and you know right before graduation
where I'd say year before graduating I have to really see if you know this is
what I want to do
well I'm actually pre-med and I participated in a similar
program for pre-dental but I wanted to see maybe optometry is my thing
I've always had this fascination for neuroscience and you know throughout my
courses in school I realized how optometry and neuroscience go hand in hand
well I am interested in going to optometry so I need to be well prepared
you know for everything so I decided to start it with the internship program
I really like primary care because I eventually want to go into primary care
and work within a community health center but I also really like to advanced
care to see people who have glaucoma cataracts and complications from those
eye disorders so those were my two favorite and I actually got to rotate
quite a lot in primary care while I was here
the most interesting experience was
meeting the staff because I met people that have been in this field for 20-plus
years and even if they haven't been in the fields for so many years they looked
and seemed as if they came to work with so much enthusiasm and there was nothing to
like wonder at that point like you just looked at them and you said I want to
come to work that happy
my biggest takeaway was shadowing the clinicians
the optometrists being able to have involvement in the clinics and seeing
patients it was absolutely enjoyable
it's not a regular internship I would
say because regular internships they usually entail just shadowing a
doctor but this internship gives you much more they give you so much
presentations so many presentations that about admissions about residency things
that you probably never know about
I never really knew how intricate the eye
is so this program really allowed me to see the intricacy of the eye as well as
get hands-on experience that I would have gotten anywhere else
prior to this I thought optometrists just do eye exams eye check up stuff like that but
coming here I didn't realize that all there's so much more like diseases
different types of conditions and that exposure really opened my eyes
even if optometry is not for you still have an open mind to what exactly optometrist
does and other ways you could get involved in the field of optometry
it's a great way to end the semester to do something that's hands-on during your
winter break as well as you learn so much that you wouldn't get anywhere else
like there's no other optometry school in New York that offers a
program like this
you don't know what you miss out on if you don't enroll into
programs like this you see so much you get to experience so much
that if you don't you're kind of you know selling yourself short
I was afraid that if I went to medical school I wouldn't like it I wasn't sure at all my
future would be but then after coming to this program I realized that medical
anything medical related especially optometry it's not suffocating I always
felt that it was suffocating and just coming here I felt some sort of freedom
and it was great I loved it and I know that this is what I want to do now