Kalie McCartin Wins AOA Award

An essay authored by Kalie McCartin ’17OD has won second place in the 2016 InfantSEE Scholarship contest conducted by the Scholarship and Endowment Fund Advisory Committee of the American Optometric Association (AOA).

InfantSEE® is a national public health program, managed by Optometry Cares – The AOA Foundation designed to ensure that eye and vision care becomes an integral part of infant wellness care to improve a child’s quality of life. Under this program, AOA optometrists provide a no-cost comprehensive eye and vision assessment for infants within the first year of life regardless of a family’s income or access to insurance coverage. McCartin says, “I really do believe that by raising awareness about vision problems in children than we can change the statistics and prevent so many from falling through the cracks and unnecessarily suffering and falling behind.”

For the past two years this native of Redding, California has volunteered and to plan the agenda and organize student and faculty volunteers for visiting grade school students from the City Neighbors Charter School in Baltimore, MD.  This has involved campus tours, clinical lab demonstrations and time for discussions, as the students come prepared with questions and research results from their student-directed, in-depth study of the eye. In 2015, two weeks after the children’s second visit to Elkins Park, McCartin and fellow student Omar Munshi ’17OD, traveled to Baltimore and spent the day at City Neighbors, helping the fifth-graders dissect cow eyeballs. Those students will return here for a third annual visit this spring.

As a result of her clinical exposure here at Salus PCO and her experience with the City Neighbors Charter School, McCartin began her own non-profit organization, The McCartin Foundation, to fund school visits to optometry programs across the country and to educate elementary school teachers on the vital importance of early vision care as a means to eliminate learning deficits for children.

This scholarship program, with a first place award of $5,000 scholarship and second place award of $2,500, is for third-year optometry students and is sponsored by Vision West, Inc. and Optometry Cares -The AOA Foundation. To be considered for this national award, students must be a member in good standing of the American Optometric Student Association (AOSA). Additionally, they must also write a 1,000 word essay and submit an under three-minute video. The essay and video must both cover four, mandatory, assigned topics that relate to the InfantSEE® program.