#med techs

[djkerr]

The Pitt gang supporting their castmate Patrick Ball at a performance of Hamlet. (May 31, 2025)

📷 @metzaballsoup, @patrickball_ IG stories

[laboratorysciencemajorrbc-blog]

Bless their hearts, tbh.

[laboratorysciencereview]

Lab students from Bowling Green from ASCLS's viral video contest (which I didn't know was a thing oop @ me)

[laboratorysciencereview]

Hello there! I recently was just accepted into my university's Clinical Lab Science program and was wondering if any fellow students or graduates had any advice for a student entering the field. Any sort of advice from certification board exam(s) to effective studying strategies would be greatly appreciated! Thank you! and I LOVE this tumblr! :D

Congrats on getting accepted!

I just have a lot of feelings, so this is gonna be a little long.

Love what you do

Honestly, I would say the biggest piece of advice I can give you is be passionate about what you’re studying. I was a general biology major for two years before I discovered laboratory science. For me, this accidental discovery was a revelation. I’ve been working in the field for about a year and a half now, and I think you can definitely tell the difference between people who love what they do, and people who just do it for a paycheck. I would say to give yourself two full terms. If you finish two terms, and you aren’t really feelin’ the field, I would advise you to figure out what you are passionate about.

That being said, feel free to like one subject more than another. I personally cannot stand clinical chemistry. I recognize and respect its importance but I would hate only doing chemistry all day. I’m much more a micro/hematology girl. And oh god, don’t even get me started on molecular biology. Kill me now. But you might love molecular. You might find that it feels like home.

Studying Laboratory Science

Everyone has different ways of studying, but I’ve always been fond of flashcards. I make flashcards for everything. I use 5X8 inch cards, and I have a box I keep them all in.

I will say this. You need to know the information you’re being taught. In this way, professional degrees are a little bit different than other types of degrees. This isn’t like your early American history class. You can’t just cram this information, take the exam, and then feel free to forget it.The things you’re being taught will be on your boards. And trust me, it’s so much better to learn these things when they’re being taught than to go back and have to learn everything on your own before your certification exam.

Learn the thing that happens ~most of the time. Will you occasionally see E. coli that’s a NLF? Sure. Of course you will. But in general, you’re going to be tested on the way things work most of the time. So if you see a question on an exam, and it’s asking about a non lactose fermenter, don’t go running off into the E. coli direction. Learn the overarching trends.

Understanding the the bigger clinical picture is important. This will help when it comes to solving case studies.

I’m also a really big fan of flow charts and graphs. Flowcharts are especially helpful for microbiology, and altered flowcharts can be made for hematology as well.

General things

Accept that your friends will have no idea what you do. Unless they’re med techs themselves, they won’t have a freaking clue. You will spend a lot of your life explaining that yes, you do need a degree to work in a lab, and no, you don’t just push buttons. Accept that this isn’t limited to lay people. Most people in that work in hospitals have no idea what goes on in the lab either.

When you eventually go on clinical rotations, learn absolutely everything you can. Ask the techs lots of questions. Learn how the analyzers work. Ask them if you can perform the daily maintenance. Ask if you can help with troubleshooting when things stop working (trust me, the analyzers will go down at some point. They always do). Experience on a particular analyzer is something you can put on your resume. Ask if you can call the floor to report critical results.

Get a color printer. Or at least have access to one. Lots of lab science is based on color reactions, or being able to detect small variations in color (for example, monocytes versus atypical lymphocytes). Being able to print these images out and put them on notecards, or in your spiral is super helpful.

Don’t let old bitter people dissuade you or make you question your career path.  Seriously, during my clinicals, I had techs telling me things like “Idk why anyone would want to go into this field” and “Ugh why are you even doing this, why wouldn’t you do nursing instead?!”  Lots of older techs are super wary of technology because they think they’re going to be put out of work. Maybe that fear is legitimate for the distant future, maybe not. I personally don’t think so. I think techs will always have a place in the clinical lab. And even if we are all eventually replaced by robots, that’s in the very far distant future. 

Get involved in the community. You can usually join your state’s lab organization for next to nothing as a student. Go to meetings/conferences/etc. Network. This will make finding a job so much easier.

Idk, I love lab science to a reallllllly geeky and nerdy degree. I love my job and I love the field. Does it have its drawbacks? Of course. But the pros completely outweigh the cons for me.

I wish you the absolute best of luck in your program!

If anyone else has advice for future med techs, feel free to send me an ask and I’ll publish them here!

[laboratorysciencereview]

While I don't necessarily consider myself a nerdfighter (although I have no problem with people that do, and that I think that they, in general, stand for good principles and do pretty good work), I was pretty excited to see that Hank Green did a SciShow about blood banking!

My only nitpick was that he left out a couple of interesting historical facts:

According to my blood bank textbook, the first blood transfusion was actually done a couple hundred years earlier, in 1492 on Pope Innocent VII- three men were were bled and transfused into the sick pope, but unfortunately, all four of the men died.

The current model we use for blood banking should probably be attributed to Dr. Charles Drew (the first director of the Red Cross blood bank director) who developed techniques in World War II for blood banking that we still use today (obviously there was a pretty big demand for blood in a really bloody war).

So that being said, I would definitely check out the comments on the youtube video itself. There seems to be a pretty staunch debate (if you can really even call it that. Most people seem to be on the same side of this issue with only a few naysayers) about MSM (men who have sex with men) being indefinitely deferred from donating.

It's worth noting that in 2010, AABB, the Red Cross, and ABC came togather and issued a joint statement to the FDA regarding the scientifically unwarranted lifetime deferment of MSM blood donors. Other than the FDA, these are the other big players in determining blood banking and transfusion practices in the united states.

You can read their joint statement here.

Also, for fairness, you can read the FDA's 'response' or stance on MSM donors here.

As a member of the LGBTQIA community and as a blood banker, I personally find that this whole thing is another example of institutionalized homophobia. While I will grant you that this ban may have been prudent in the mid 80s, we have come a long way since then with our ability to both detect and treat HIV/AIDS. With NAT testing, the classic "window period" is shrinking dramatically, and MSM are arguably not even the group at the highest risk for this disease (that would be African American women).

However, because the FDA is the only major organization dragging it's heels on this issue, I urge you to contact your congressperson, your senator, or get in touch with the FDA directly.

A little digging with the google machine can bring up multiple studies that essentially reinforce that this policy is antiquated and promotes discrimination and homophobia. But even more importantly, it disqualifies perfectly acceptable donors, many of whom could be saving lives with their donations.

While there may be a future in artificially made blood being used for transfusions, that time is still a very long way off, and blood donations are always needed and appreciated. Donating save lives and expanding the donor pool to new, perfectly acceptable donors is a net positive in my book.

So yeah, that's just my two cents. I'd love to hear what others think!

[laboratorysciencemajorrbc-blog]

This didn't happen to me, but it did happen to another tech at my facility. She was pretty miffed. Especially because the doctor got mad when he kept repeating synonyms for mature neutrophils and she kept saying no.

[laboratorysciencereview]

Okay, it's time to respond to the Forbes article.

For those of who who haven't heard, there was an article published by Forbes on the 3rd titled "The Least Stressful Jobs Of 2013".

Lab techs were listed as #5.

To quote the article: "According to Tony Lee, CareerCast’s publisher, the least stressful jobs have one thing in common: autonomy. “These jobs tend not to have someone standing over their shoulder putting pressure on them to get things done,” he says. University professors answer to themselves, he points out. “They are basically kings of their own fiefdoms.” The same is true for the other jobs on the least stressful list, including seamstress/tailor, which ranks second. “In these jobs, you’re doing something for which you are highly qualified and you’re the expert in how to get things done,” he adds. That’s the case for medical records and medical laboratory technicians, ranked numbers three and five on the list. Those jobs must be done with precision. The people who do them tend to work on their own, without much supervision. The same goes for jewelers, number four on the list, audiologists, dieticians and hair stylists.

The other thing most of the least stressful jobs have in common: At the end of the day, people in these professions can leave their work behind, and their hours tend to be the traditional nine to five." 

Okay to summarize what this article seems to be saying about us:

We work without supervision (at least it's because we're very qualified)

We don't have someone looking over our shoulderand i guess this doesn't include nurses/doctors calling and yelling and throwing full on adult tantrums for results

We don't take our work home with uswhich is just blatant a lie,espeically, i would argue, if you work inmicrobiology!

Apparently hospital labs are pretty much only open from 9-5 because that's when most of us work. Which I'm just gonna go ahead and call flat out BS on, no sarcastic strike-through need apply. I work alone on a night shift and I think it's incredibly stressful. I don't have anyone to bounce ideas off of. I don't have one to look at my Antibody screen and confirm that "something just isn't right here" or what have you. I have to make all decisions on my own. If the instrument breaks and I get a stat cross match, i'm in REAL trouble. So yeah. Not only do we work 24 hours a day, I would argue that not having a full support system on the night shift can be incredibly stressful!

So I think it's pretty clear from the above that I vehemently disagree that our job is one of the least stressful (I don't by any means think it's the most stressful either, but we have our fair share of stress). That being said, the real thing I want to discuss here is the response to this article.

Which  I will discuss behind the cut bc this is super long. You're welcome, tbh. 

I'm going to preface this by saying that I am not a hair stylist, I don't know any seamstresses, and I haven't encountered an audiologist since I was in primary school. I have no idea what these communities are saying about this article. I have no idea how they're responding. So the two things I want to highlight here are the med tech response vs the professor response.

Professors all over the country (and world) came out against this article- publicly on the Forbes.com website. They had a hashtag on twitter about it. They were really mad and they wanted everyone to know it!**. They were not going to take this sort of misconception about their field lying down, damn it! They pretty much came out in full force to let the author know that She. Was. Wrong. and pretty much intellectually beat her into submission.  To her credit, the author of the article did respond to tons of comments and even added an addendum to her original article saying that she may have spoken too soon, she didn't know how the original date was collected, etc etc etc.

Lab techs complained amongst ourselves.....on facebook? Kind of? We certainly didn't embark on some kind of cohesive internet campaign to let the author know how wrong she was. But should we have? Could we have?

For me, the biggest problem is that even if we were to complain about the biggest stresses we face in the clinical laboratory, most people don't have the science/health background to understand what the hell we are talking about. 

If you try to tell the author of the article, "Um, try having a trauma come in where 3 passengers will need to be typed, screened, and have units cross-matched STAT and you are the only person there then an analyzer breaks and you need to call the tech line" etc etc, they will have no idea what goes into that, and even what a lot of that means. Most of the general public doesn't even have a frame of reference to have this conversation with us. They don't know what goes into someone receiving a unit of blood. They don't know what goes into doing a diff on a little girl who comes into the ER because her parents can't figure out what's wrong with her but you look at the smear and immediately see a field of lymphocytic blasts.

Most people never encountered a lab tech in a professional setting. We are constantly behind the scenes and one does not simply walk into Mordor a laboratory.

So people never encounter us.  They never see what we do. Most people don't even think about the testing that their blood/other fluids/tissues undergo in the search for diagnosis. And yet 80% of medical decisions regarding a patient's care are the result of lab testing.

And the thing is, we as a profession are flat out terrible at advocating for ourselves. So this isn't the public's fault, and it certainly isn't this Forbes employee's fault. But we do need to raise awareness (lololol lab techs have been harping about this for how long now?) about our profession and the knowledge and skill set we have. If you think about it, what we do everyday (and what we COULD do everyday if e needed to call upon skills or knowledge that we have but don't often get the opportunity to use) isreally cool.And, you know, it saves lives. So there's that, too.

tl;dr: Our jobs are stressful, but it's not entirely the general public's fault for not knowing that. We need to advocate for ourselves a profession more, and help educate people about what it is that we actually do all day. It certainly, by the way, isn't just loading things onto instruments and eating bonbons waiting for results.

So anyways. That's what I think. I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks on the subject.

**And they weren't wrong. People should be corrected when they make conclusions based on incorrect information. College profs often get a be reputation and it's pretty ridiculous.