Hi everyone! Since I’ve just finished my second year at Plymouth and will be going into my third year of Optometry in September (I’m starting to feel a bit old now…), I thought I’d share some tips for the first year of your degree!

Personally, I found the workload of first year to be less than second year. I wish I spent a bit more time seeing my friends and maybe joined a couple more societies than I did, as I often put myself under a lot of pressure to do as much studying as I could. I think a piece of advice I would give myself a year ago would be: as long as you manage your time well, and make sure you leave enough time to revise lectures and attend practise sessions etc you will be absolutely fine!

I know it’s a bit tempting to want to get rid of your lecture notes after exams but you’ll 100% need the majority of them in second and even third year, since a lot of your modules build on lectures from previous years.

Even though at Plymouth (I’m not sure about other universities) you only start to study pathology in second year, if you wanted to give yourself a bit of a head start over summer, it could be good to have a look at the Clinical Management Guidelines. They’re simple and quick to glance over so if you’re getting bored, I’d give some a read!

For me, practicals were the only way I could really understand how to do clinical skills like ret and volk. Even though it might be tempting to miss practise sessions, I would try your best to go to them all! You’ll definitely thank yourself in the second year!