NZAO student awards 2018

June 6, 2018 Lesley Springall

The New Zealand Association of Optometrists (NZAO) 2018 student awards was an upbeat affair, with NZAO board members amusingly recounting their first days in the job and reminiscing about the personalities behind many of the newly-named awards.

Wilson Sue encouraged the student attendees not to panic “too much” about finding work as things don’t always go as planned, but everything always works out in time. Also, don’t worry about always having to be 100% correct all the time; your patients think you’re an A-student anyway and there’s always someone to ask if you are unsure about something, he said.

Dunedin-based optometrist and long-time NZAO supporter, Jack Crawford, also took us back to the past, recalling his somewhat fraught road trip down South as he made his way to his first job in a car that was lucky to make it out of Auckland, let alone to Dunedin. He reminisced about how surprising and rewarding it was to find patients actually believed in you and relied on your skills to help them. NZAO vice president and MC for the evening, the more recently-graduated, Chelsey Wood, said she found it wasn’t her skills she was worried about, as today’s BOptom course is very thorough, but whether anyone would talk to her at lunch or if she needed her own coffee cup at her new practice. You soon get the hang of things, however, she said, and your patients make it all so rewarding.

NZAO president Rochelle van Eysden then presented this year’s awards, saying that many of the awards have now been renamed to recognise people who have made an important contribution to optometry education and development in New Zealand, lest they be forgotten.

This year’s award winners are:

• HC Russell Memorial Postgraduate Scholarship - Alyssa Lie
• NZAO Postgraduate Scholarship - Rebecca Findlay
• Leon Garner Award for Top Student Entering Part III - Jessie Ye
• Most Improved Student Entering Part IV - Michael Croft
• Robert Jacobs Award for Top Student Entering Part IV - Muthana Noori
• Most Improved Student Entering Part V - Ran Jingle
• 2nd to Top Student Entering Part V - Alice Jackson
• Michael Kalloniatis Award for Top Student Entering Part V - Jennifer Lee
• Peg Wood Award - Jennifer Lee