After earning her degree from the College of Optometry earlier this month, Haley Metz is starting a residency at the Cincinnati VA Medical Center. (Photo courtesy of Haley Metz)
Haley Metz had a lot of memorable patient experiences while studying at the University of Missouri–St. Louis College of Optometry, but she’ll never forget her time spent working at a kids’ summer camp in Fishkill, New York.
Through a trip with UMSL’s chapter of Student Volunteer Optometric Services to Humanity, which sends students to schools, Native American reservations and refugee resettlement institutions across the country to provide eye care, Metz helped conduct vision screenings for low-income children from New York’s five boroughs. Over the course of the clinic, Metz saw many children who had a very high prescription but had lost their previous pair of glasses altogether.
“You’re thinking, ‘How were they going about their life in school without being able to see?’” Metz said. “That as a whole was just super rewarding – to be able to see them get their glasses and be a whole new person and just light up. I think SVOSH has definitely been my most memorable experiences in eye care because the patients are getting the glasses right away, so you can see exactly the work you’re doing and the immediate effect it has on the patients.”
Through SVOSH, Metz was also able to participate in a large-scale clinic for kids in Kansas City hosted by EssilorLuxottica, in which she worked primarily with Spanish-speaking patients. Since she doesn’t speak Spanish herself, she had to rely on an interpreter for much of the clinic, during which volunteers conducted hundreds of exams for children and also provided them with a free pair of glasses. While performing translated eye exams was certainly a challenge, Metz said it was incredibly rewarding to see her young patients get so excited to put on their new pair of glasses and finally be able to see everything their peers could.
In addition to SVOSH, Metz was involved in UMSL’s Private Practice Club and various intramural sports. A St. Louis native, she was drawn to the small class sizes in the College of Optometry, which facilitate a close-knit community and supportive, personal environment that made her excited to go to class every day and participate in activities with classmates outside of the classroom.
“I feel like I’ve made a really close group of friends and I know everyone in my class,” Metz said. “It allows us to know our professors a lot better, and for them to know us better as well, which I think makes it feel like more of a tighter community and more trusting. I’ve really enjoyed my time with all the faculty and all my classmates. It just feels like such a personal, personable environment that I think is unique to our school.”
Through her rotations, Metz gained hands-on clinical experience in a diverse range of settings, from Mulqueeny Eye Centers, a family-owned private practice owned by UMSL alums, to Pepose Vision Institute, where she shadowed ophthalmologists and observed surgeries, to her community clinic rotation at Family Care Health Center in Carondelet, where she saw firsthand the meaningful impact eye care could have on the lives of her patients.
“I’ve had a lot of really memorable patient experiences as a student,” Metz said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s a new thing that I’ve learned about that I’m seeing now in clinic. I understand what this is, and I know how to treat it.’ I have really enjoyed applying what I’ve seen in books, seeing it in a real patient and being able to recall what the treatment option is. That’s just a rewarding feeling – knowing that your education is paying off.”
But it was her final rotation at the Kansas City VA Medical Center that ended up being Metz’s favorite – and the experience that would ultimately end up shaping her future career as an optometrist. As an extern, Metz found the VA to be a great teaching facility. She enjoyed learning more about patient education from her preceptor and having the opportunity to practice her skills so that she feels confident working on her own as an optometrist.
Through her rotation, Metz found a love for the VA system that made her realize she was exactly where she wanted to be. She was drawn to the system’s focus on patient care and also knew she wanted to pursue a residency focused on ocular disease, which is becoming a growing problem among in the veteran population. And since her patients were able to use their VA benefits to cover their care, she found she didn’t need to worry about which services their insurance would or would not cover.
“That makes my role more enjoyable, because I know I can give them the best care I can without having to worry about burdening them with the financial stress,” she said.
After earning her degree from the College of Optometry earlier this month, Metz is starting a residency at the Cincinnati VA Medical Center. She said the Cincinnati VA ended up being the perfect fit, as she’ll be able to continue providing care for veterans while also furthering her skills in ocular disease, specialty contact lenses and low vision. A self-described “Missouri homebody,” Metz is excited to branch out to a new Midwestern city, but she’s also looking forward to continuing to work with preceptors in an academic setting, as she knows there’s still much to learn.
“I want to learn from other optometrists,” Metz said. “I’m really excited to work on perfecting all my skills in patient care so that whenever I come out after my residency, I’ll feel super confident and prepared to treat anything that I see and know how to help the patients that I’ll see for my whole life.”
As she embarks on those next steps, Metz feels that the College of Optometry has set her up for success, from the foundational knowledge she learned in the classroom to the hands-on skills she learned throughout her various externships.
“That really is the time where I feel like I learned the most: applying what I had learned in our classwork to clinical care, and then having different modes of practice and different preceptors teach me how they do things,” Metz said. “I can integrate what I learned in the classroom to what I’m learning in clinic. I think UMSL really helped lay the groundwork for me to learn so much more in fourth year because I knew what questions to ask. I knew what I did know, and I knew what I didn’t really know. UMSL did a good job of preparing us to go into our externship sites, and then they had a great selection of sites where I was able to learn even more.”
