Optometry Schoo Essay

My parent's garage is piled with books and magazines on photography; my dad had probably a couple-dozen cameras and, over the years, everything from a wide-angle lens to a lens that could just about photograph astronauts on the moon from our back yard; he had enlargers, dozens of feet of film, and boxes and boxes of the photos he's been snapping since before the time I even met him. He even turned a space in the garage into a darkroom, and taught me how to use a camera and how to develop the pictures.

I used to stand in that tiny room and watch images appear like magic on the papers dad dipped into the trays filled with liquid. "Watch it now," he'd say, nearly whispering, when he knew the developer would bring the image up, "here it comes!" And a portrait of my sister and I or a snapshot of a trip to the mountains would suddenly fade into view, like people stepping toward you through a fog. Photography has always been an important element in my life. My father is a professional photographer, and throughout my upbringing I was taken to help him with the pictures of baseball teams, cheerleaders, graduations, beauty pageants, and even weddings. I was trained on the use of most equipment. However; despite my training, to this day, my photographs are notorious for "Red Eye."

I notice this more looking through old photographs. Every person in my photos has that evil red glow in their eyes......except for my niece. In every photo I have of her, she has the red glow in her left eye and her right eye looks normal. Why would only one eye glow red you may ask? Well, Red eye, of course, is the phenomenon that occurs when the camera flash reflects off your subject's blood-rich retina. This happens when the pupils are wide open because you're shooting in the dark or in low light. Then it hit me....my niece has a prosthetic eye. That would explain why there is no red reflection into my camera. My niece was born prematurely and her eye did not have time to develop fully. She is one of the few people that can truly appreciate how fragile, and essential your vision is. She knows that she is lucky to have the most highly valued human sense-sight.

While my admiration for a medical career began in childhood, I entered high school lacking definitive career direction. So I joined a club at a local hospital called Medical Explorers, a program offered to high school students who are interested in medical careers. Each month we would hear doctors lecture, go on rounds at the hospital, and sometimes observe mock procedures. This gave me insight into the diverse field of medicine. Medical Explorers was offered during the school year only, and so throughout the summers I chose to participate in a program called the Volunteens, at Comanche County Memorial Hospital, here I was assigned a specific area for 4 weeks and then rotated to a new area so that I could see the daily operations of the different pieces of the hospital. After my two years involved in these programs, I had finally chosen