History
The University of Waterloo School of Optometry opened on July 1, 1967 (the Canadian Centennial). Before this time, optometrists were trained at the College of Optometry of Ontario in Toronto. The size of the program doubled once this affiliation with UW was established. Dr. Edward J. Fisher served as the new school's first dean until 1975. Fisher had been dean of the College of Optometry for 19 years beforehand, and from 1969 to 1970 he served as the 23rd President of the American Academy of Optometry, the first Canadian to serve in that capacity.
Classes and administrative offices were originally based in the Math and Computer building and the Biology 1 buildings at the University in Waterloo. A clinic was established in the old post office at 35 King Street North. In 1973, the Optometry building was built in its present location on the north side of Columbia St, where lecture halls and clinic facilities were available in one place.
The Doctor of Optometry (OD) degree has been a four-year program since the 1950s at the College of Optometry of Ontario, where a Grade 13 high school education was sufficient for admission. Since then, the program has remained four years in length, but the curriculum has changed remarkably. Because of this, the prerequisite level of education has also changed: first from a minimum of one year of university science education, then a minimum of two years, now a minimum of three years. Specific courses, encompassing subjects from biology to chemistry to physics to psychology, are also required. These requirements are still changing, and applicants to the school in 2008 will require at least three years of pre-Optometry university education.
Read more about this topic: University Of Waterloo School Of Optometry
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)