Its FLAME TIME!!!
WHY would you want to optometry? If the best reasons are money (which is a fallacy), and the ratio of girls:guys in the course, then that's pretty sad.
Even when optometrists own their own store, they don't make 'stacks' (also why you so often see them in shopping centers, not in high office blocks). Compare them to someone whose similarly established with a commerce/psychology/specialist med/engineering degree and I'd say the optometrist would be making about 20% of what the others would.. the prob is that you can't become really big in optometry like you can in the other above professions... at the end of the day you are fitting/selling glasses to people, your name isn't going to mean that much as it does in those other professions (and besides, ppl don't regularly go to optometrists).
Personally, I don't see the appeal in administering the same eye tests to people every day and then giving them some glasses. One good thing tho is they have a 100% employment rate when they leave uni
and kaseita, they don't have 'patients', they have clients. The difference is that patients generally see say a clin psychologist/shrink/doctor etc for help, people go to optometrists for glasses
You definitely cannot become a surgeon, whoever said that is getting it mixed up (as lexico said), with opthalmology, which is completely different (and I believe that would be an interesting career path, with more innovation + room for exploration, not just doing the same thing every day).
If you want lots of girls, go do an arts course or something, there will be a lot more than you will find in optometry.
Crazy Lobster, it sounds like you judge a course by its UAI (if you miss out on ur course by decimals, you'll pick opto -its not far down from the course you want -correct me if I'm wrong). The MAIN reason the UAI is so high for it is cos UNSW is the only uni that offers optometry in NSW.