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Meet Samantha and find out about her life as an optometrist.

What is your job?

Being an optometrist is brilliant! I do about 15 eye tests a day.

I’ve always loved science and I’ve always been into machines, so combining the two is ideal for me. Being an optometrist means that I really get to do all the things I love every day.

It can be a little odd looking at the back of people's eyeballs because nobody else really gets to see that.

I did about 2700 eye tests last year, so that’s a lot of eyes and you get used to it quickly! We can even test the eyes of tiny babies.

What’s it like to be an optometrist?

It is super fun and really interesting and I meet lots of different people every single day.

We can tell if people have different diseases from their eyes, so our job is very important – and it also helps people to see properly!

The hardest part for me was getting on top of the problem solving side of my job - it can be tricky working out what is wrong with someone’s eyes. But now it’s my favourite part of the job!

I work as part of a team so it’s nice being able to ask my team for help if I need it. I’m very clumsy and I’ve broken a few machines so they’re always there to help me clean up the mess too.

Everyone has different eyes so there’s lots of different things to do every day, and I get to use science for it all!

How do you become an optometrist?

Throughout school I always knew I wanted to do something sciencey. There's lots of physics and biology and that builds into eye conditions, doing the eye tests and working out prescriptions.

It took five years at university to become a qualified optometrist.

It is important to be really friendly and able to talk to lots of different people as this is what makes a good optometrist.