If you were to draw a Venn diagram of the recent alums featured in this article, you would see that while their paths may have significantly overlapped at ICO, since graduating their paths have diverged. All four chose to pursue residency. One chose a two-year program, and one chose to move to UC Berkeley; three remained at ICO. Two are from Canada, three are women, and one is working in a rural area.

One area where all of the alums do overlap is that each of them had their optometry education or early career rooted in the disruptions of the COVID pandemic. Embarking on a new field of study or new career is challenging in the most mundane of times, but throw a global pandemic in the mix and, well, recent alums had no choice but to gain some unexpected valuable experience in learning how to pivot and adapt, skills that will no doubt come in handy with the shifting landscape of optometry.

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Amrit Bilkhu, OD ’19, is founder and co-host of the Four Eyes Podcast, and leaned into the uncertainty of the era to help shape her career trajectory, “Four Eyes was started in March 2020 out of a group text chain with three fellow ICO alums and it became our mutual support system. They were already practicing, and I was in my residency at UC Berkeley. It was a place to share our fears and anxieties of being new grads in real time. We thought others might be able to listen to us making mistakes and we could all learn together. We hit the record button and just kept going.”

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And now, over five years later, Dr. Bilkhu is still going with the podcast and her career. She is the co-owner (with ICO alum, Manraj Fervaha, OD ’17) of Northern Sight Optometry in Ontario, Canada, while also maintaining a professional social media presence, the podcast, and lecturing at professional conferences. “’Private practice is not for the weak’ is what I’ve always heard,” says Dr. Bilkhu, “I thought I would land in a corporate setting, but I wanted autonomy and fell in love with the idea of private practice. You need motivation for it with long-term goals and a vision.”

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Negar Sohbati, OD ’20 would agree. Like Dr. Bilkhu, Dr. Sohbati is Canadian and also practices in a private practice, “I finished my residency and assumed I would be in an academic setting, but in Canada there is only one English speaking school of optometry, so clinical practice is one of the only options for optometrists.” She is an associate at Toronto’s Victoria Village Optometry, a three-lane practice with two optometrists. “I am an associate now, but working towards buying into the practice.”
 

Dr. Sohbati has an undergraduate degree in neuroscience and is crafting a career that will combine her passion for both optometry and neuroscience, “The eye is more than an organ, it is a direct extension of the central nervous system.” That passion sparked an ongoing relationship with RetiSpec, a Canadian firm that uses AI to detect biomarkers for Alzheimer’s and other dementias through retinal scanning. Her practice in Toronto served as one of the Canadian national sites selected by RetiSpec to provide the scanning, gaining valuable data for researchers as the program scales up. 

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“It is important to use tech to our advantage,” says Dr. Sohbati, “Using retinal scanning is a non-invasive way to check for dementia biomarkers that can more easily guide family physicians and neurologists. Optometry is very powerful, and the field has the potential to go way beyond glasses and vision checks. We are in a generational shift and must learn how to leverage the technology.”
 

That concept of ‘generational shift’ can describe the advancements of technology in the field, but also the importance mentoring has for younger optometrists in the early stages of their career. Luke Rockne, OD ’23, knows something about this. Greg Kouri, OD ’93, was the father of a friend of Dr. Rockne’s twin sister. Dr. Kouri, a respected optometrist running a legacy practice in his home state of South Dakota, needed some landscape work done on his home. Young college aged Luke was happy to do the work and stayed all summer.

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The two got to know one another well over the course of those few months, “Greg has become one of the most influential people in my life—he’s like a second dad to me now. I look up to him and he cares about me as a person.” At the point of their meeting, Dr. Rockne was considering applying to medical school, but he was interested in hearing about Dr. Kouri’s optometry practice and asked if he could shadow him one day, “He’s just a great doctor. My parents did not go to college, but Greg encouraged me. We’ve developed a great friendship as he has taught me and showed me the ropes of optometry.”
 

Choosing ICO was easy, given that Dr. Kouri had studied there as well. “I loved Chicago,” says Dr. Rockne, “In South Dakota, I had not been exposed to much about the ‘big city’—no one locks their cars where I come from, but getting used to the city was fun and I had a positive adjustment.” While studying at ICO, Dr. Rockne found his “Chicago version of Greg” in Leonard Messner, OD, Professor and Vice President of Strategy and Institutional Advancement. 

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“There’s so much to learn,” says Dr. Rockne, “A residency was a must for me. The pathology that rolls through ICO is pretty unique. I knew it would give me the foundation I needed to treat any kind of disease or pathology I would see. I really enjoy a problem and ICO’s clinic provided a funnel of cases that challenged me.”