After raising a family, Tiffany Aldridge Rhine went back to school and earned her optometry degree from UMSL. Now, she’s working at the Center for Vision and Learning, a private practice in Des Peres, Missouri. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)

Tiffany Aldridge Rhine has always told her four children that they can do and achieve whatever they want. She’s spent years encouraging them to think long and hard about what interests them and find a way to pursue their passions. A few years ago, she decided to finally take her own advice.

Aldridge Rhine, who earned her bachelor’s in business administration from the University of Missouri–St. Louis in 2000, worked for five years at a marketing company after graduating before leaving her job to focus on raising her family. In 2019, her kids were all in school, and the timing felt right to make a change and explore her own passions. She debated returning to the business world, but when an issue of UMSL Magazine arrived in the mail, featuring an interview with College of Optometry student Adam Wira, it caught her attention. Not long after, a missionary at her church spoke about recent service work collecting glasses for people without access to eye care in other parts of the world. Aldridge Rhine, who has worn glasses herself since the first grade, felt like a seed was being planted.

“I was just at a point where I was ready to explore that a little bit, and I thought that I might want to do something new and different,” she said. “A few of these things all started happening while I was trying to explore the idea of, well, ‘What is it I want to do?’”

Aldridge Rhine settled on optometry and felt it was fortuitous that UMSL is home to the only college of optometry in Missouri. She was initially intimidated to go back to school and take courses on topics such as neuroanatomy and optics and prayed that – especially as a nontraditional student – she’d get along with her classmates. Luckily, she found an incredibly supportive environment in the tight-knit College of Optometry, which she credits with helping her get through four years of challenging coursework and clinical rotations.

In particular, she enjoyed the college’s after-hours contact lens staple workshops, which offered her and her classmates an opportunity to come together for some extra hands-on learning about fitting different types of contact lenses. Other than a little shadowing and her own experience as a patient, Aldridge Rhine didn’t have much clinical experience before starting in the College of Optometry, which made the experience feel nerve-wracking. But once she received her white coat after completing her first two years of school, she knew she was making progress.

“It was hard to overcome the anticipation of seeing your first patients – these are real patients,” she said. “I was afraid to get things wrong or do things in the wrong order or miss something. So, it was really overwhelming. I would get so, so nervous. But I just had to take it one day at a time. And I think over the course of the last two years, because now I’ve been in clinic quite a bit, I’ve finally gotten to a point where I’m feeling confident about the routine of the exam and how to alter it as needed for patients with different needs. It’s taken a while, but it’s exciting to see the growth and the change.”

Aldridge Rhine, who graduated from the College of Optometry earlier this month, is now working at the Center for Vision and Learning, a private practice in Des Peres, Missouri, that offers vision therapy and serves children and adults for functional visual conditions such as binocular vision problems, tracking difficulties, vision-related learning difficulties, sports performance, medical conditions and visual rehabilitation. In particular, Aldridge Rhine will be doing sports vision therapy and also seeing pediatric patients with binocular vision issues as well as patients with traumatic brain injuries.

She’s excited to work with Dr. Cheryl Davidson, a founding member of the Center for Vision and Learning who she knows will be a great sounding board, and to learn more specifically about binocular vision dysfunction in patients with traumatic brain injuries. Her UMSL coursework and clinical rotations have equipped her with plenty of experience performing vision therapy and working with pediatric patients, which she knows will serve her well in this new role.

Aldridge Rhine hopes her journey of going back to school can serve as an example to her kids and reinforce the message that she’s spent years telling them. Being in school at the same time as her kids drew her family even closer in ways she hadn’t anticipated as they sympathized over big upcoming tests and shared study habits.

“I was so blessed by that experience because I felt like I was doing school alongside them,” she said. “They were an encouragement to me – as they saw me studying late into the evening they would say, ‘Mom, you can do it’ while they headed up to bed. It was super encouraging to me. I’m hoping that this shows them that it’s doable. It may take a lot, but it’s doable.”