Hello from the New Zealand Optometry Student Society (NZOSS) executive team 2022! For those not familiar with us, we are a student body acting as a professional platform to bridge the gap between current optometry students, experienced professionals and the eyecare community.
NZOSS’ 2021 was somewhat bittersweet. It started as a lockdown/Covid-19-free year and ended unpredictably. Despite the latter half of the year, the team still worked hard and made 2021 memorable for the right reasons.
Our main goal this year is to adapt to whatever conditions we’re presented with, providing optometry students with the best support throughout their degree. Unfortunately, the university has announced that the first half of semester one will be primarily held online. However, the team is not discouraged and will work even harder to make 2022 a fantastic year! To this end, the NZOSS executive team has been busy organising some amazing events, restrictions permitting.
We always start the year with our friendly BBQ, where we welcome the new part-two students and give them a chance to talk to students in different years about what to expect throughout the degree. Optometry camp is a highly anticipated event that will take place later in semester one. A relaxing weekend after a stressful week of tests allows everyone to unwind and spend some quality time with each other. We have many more events planned for throughout the year, in person and online, including quiz and games nights (online), pub crawls and, of course, our annual Eyeball!
On a more educational note, we have also sorted out a few seminars throughout the year. This is an opportunity not only for students to learn about real-world optometry, but also to build rapport with our sponsors and the wider industry.
