As the leaves change colors and reach the ground and the dawning of the fall semester of your third year of optometry school arrives, a broad spectrum of emotions is encountered. You’re finally beginning to gain confidence in your clinical skills (or at least enough to have a meaningful conversation with your attending doctor). You’ve chosen your extern sites for the following year – hopefully without too much heartache. Oddly enough, you start getting this warm and fuzzy feeling inside you that you may actually be a doctor some day soon. Then all of a sudden, it hits you. Like a 2-ton box of textbooks and PowerPoint slides. Everything you’ve learned over the past 3+ years is about to come full circle and be evaluated by the National Board of Examiners in Optometry. Part I is suddenly just around the corner and you’ve already forgotten the different types of hypersensitivity and have no idea what a Krukenburg’s spindle is. Rest assured, you’re not alone in this flood of panic. If you’re like me you have classmates reminding you daily “I really need to start looking over stuff.” More than 6,500 students a year go through the same stages of grief when it comes to NBEO, and nearly all of them come out the other end with a “P” next to their score report.
1. Denial and Isolation
You refuse to accept the fact that before the weather gets warm again you’ll have already bubbled in 500 answers that symbolize your understanding of the “Applied Basic Sciences”. You stop socializing with friends in fear that it will take away time from studying…although you really haven’t begun leafing through material yet.
2. Anger
You begrudgingly open your books and start studying. You scream at yourself “how can they really expect us to know all this stuff?”, “why did I not start studying sooner?” and “why is this white and gold dress so much more intriguing than the Kreb’s cycle?”. You start blaming inanimate objects for your shortcomings (because that darn highlighter just doesn’t have enough ink in it).
3. Bargaining
At this stage you begin making deals with higher deities and even your instructors. “Please just let me pass this test so I don’t have to go through studying all this again!” and “If you wait to give us that Perioperative Management final until after boards, I promise I’ll rock it” (when secretly you know once you take this exam you’ll have little to no motivation left to study).
Test day comes and goes…
4. Depression
You walk out of the exam knowing it’s taken its toll on your body and mind. You reflect on the fact that you’ve spent the last few months pouring your heart and soul into preparation, and you still probably missed around 100 questions.
5. Acceptance
You finally realize that it’s all over with, there’s nothing you can do now but wait 4 weeks to see your scores and celebrate the massive undertaking you and your fellow classmates have just completed. It’s been a wild ride, but you have confidence in knowing that no matter what happens you are smarter now than you have ever been in your life…and you know a heck-of-a-lot more about the eyeball than the average Joe!
To all my fellow third years, cheers my friends! We ‘ve cleared another hurdle on our way to the finish line in our program. To you underclassmen, take solace in knowing that all of us upperclassmen have made it through unscathed and you will too…very soon. Seriously, go read over the Kreb’s cycle and tell me what it is.
