Find Your Charge Through a Career in Optometry

At 27 years old, my business partner and I opened our own optometry and vision therapy practice. As a vision therapist, I work with kids with binocular vision disorders, lazy eyes, eye turns, or reading issues, and adults with traumatic brain injuries, post-stroke, or post-concussion vision syndrome. Because I see them on a biweekly basis, and through rehabilitating their vision, I get to understand how they’re using their eyes. So as they progress through their program, I witness all the positive changes they go through—allowing me to really feel the benefit of what I’m doing with them every day.

For me, when I career shadowed other medical doctors, I found that some didn’t get to begin their life outside of work until they were much older. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted to be present and young with a family. Optometry allowed me to do that. There’s not that many eye emergencies to take me from my family. My quality of life is wonderful, and I have everything I could ever ask for.

I became an optometrist because everybody needs health care, and optometry empowers me to provide an affordable health care to my community. I’m able to have an immediate, life-changing impact on patients—whether that’s through detection of a serious health issue, or through lenses that help them see their world. It’s about being the best I can and giving that to everyone else. If you’re a student interested in challenging yourself, interested in providing for your community, you should become a Doctor of Optometry.

Developing relationships is everything to me. Optometry gives that to me, and so does my event planning business. It’s how I express myself and bring people together. Seeing everybody connect with each other, to see all the faces, all the people joyous, free, relaxed, just enjoying the company and forgetting about all their worries, it’s a happiness that can’t be bought. Optometry also gives me the financial security to be able to raise a family, but more importantly, it gives me the time to spend with that family.

I chose optometry because I wanted to be a voice for people that can’t have a voice or don’t know how to use their voice to say if something is wrong. That happens a lot with children with special needs. They can’t tell you if they can’t see. So I come in, and I’m able to advocate for them, tell the parent, “They need eyeglasses. They need vision therapy. They aren’t thriving because they can’t see, and I can easily change that.” I’m also changing lives in the lecture hall. I’m educating future doctors that are then going to impact others’ lives. It’s like I’m impacting all these lives that I will never even know about.

Optometry has fulfilled me. I’m able to feel good about what I do every day, go home, and have a life of my own. Salsa dancing is my escape from everything. It makes me feel alive. I dance competitively, and practice four or five nights of the week (sometimes every night of the week if I can). And every Friday, I attend salsa night at the local aquarium.