Submitted by Jessica Barr, COMT, ROUB
The COT program at Camden County College is bustling this year. We have a total of 15 students this year; the highest enrollment in the past three years. Dan Banks, ABO, NCLE and Jessica Barr, COMT, ROUB are the current program coordinators, and have been actively working to promote the program in the community and recruit new students. Patrick Goughary, ABO, NCLE, CLSA continues to teach ocular anatomy and terminology in the Fall, and Contact Lens Fitting in the spring. Jessica teach History Taking, Pharmacology, and Clinical Procedures courses. This past year we had Vince Sorgentoni, OD teaching our Optics course. We continue to have a strong faculty and advisory board, with a wonderful depth and breadth of experience.
This past year, we had our COA-OMP accreditation site visit. We are pleased to announce that we received very positive reviews. One area of constructive feedback for the program was in regard to the lack of diagnostic testing equipment available to our students. Since we are a community college based training program, we do have limited financial resources to support integration of expensive diagnostic equipment in to our curriculum.
This past year we have coordinated with industry sales rep from Accutome and Zeiss to bring their equipment to our campus for in-service sessions. Our students were thrilled to have hands-on demo experience with the Accutome A scan, B scan, and UBM during the Fall semester. In the Spring semester, we had Carl Zeiss bring a fundus camera, Cirrus OCT, and Atlas topographer to the college. We found the industry sales reps to be very receptive to our request for on campus demos, and would recommend this as a resource for other ophthalmic training programs.
Our students continue to excel in their careers, and several recent alumni are planning to take their certification exams soon. The demand for our program interns and alumni is high, and we have had a high rate of student and alumni placement. We are working on connecting our student alumni to increase networking and opportunities for our current and past students. We use social networking, like our private group on Facebook, to connect our past and present students. Our current year students are looking forward to taking advantage of the free ATPO membership offered by COTP member programs.
We hope to see all of you at the COTP meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada later this year!