I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying the causes and processes of illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
In a word YES!
The longer answer is I love my job because I get to combine my loves of playing in a science lab all day, medicine and helping people. I’m fortunate to work in a regional area, which mean that I am whats called a multi-disciplinary scientist, so I get to do a little bit of everything.
Some days I will be doing biochemistry (so testing blood samples and doing peoples kidney function, liver function, glucose levels, cholesterol levels, plus some other elements like calcium and magnesium as well as running urine samples for protien and albumin levels and urine drug screens), or I could be doing haematology, where I am checking peoples haemoglobin (how well their blood can carry oxygen) and white blood cell counts and bloodbanking where I could just be checking blood group and antibody screens, or I could be madly crossmatching blood for a bleeding patient! In our lab if you are in the microbiology department shift you only have to work there in the afternoon setting the samples up onto the agar plates to send to our main lab in Perth, on the mornings when our collection centre is busiest the micro scientist can be found helping our collecting blood samples there or in the hospital.
A big part of a medical laboratory scientists job is quality control (QC) – we run QC samples on our machines at the start of every shift before we do any patients so that we know our machines are running correctly. We need to be sure that the results we give to the doctors are correct, because they will use them to treat patients…our answers will change peoples lives! If the QC material doesnt work we have to do some problem solving (another fun part of the job!), which often means we have to pull the machine apart to fix it. Because I am in a regional lab, part of my job is actually machine engineer….FUN! 😀
My job is not always so fun, sometimes it can be stressful, especially when there is an emergency and you are trying to get results for the doctor quickly and they dont think it is quick enough. Or if a patient you do tests on quite regularly and get to know sadly passes away. But other parts of it definately make up for that – knowing that the science I am doing is going to help people get well, seeing a patient you have helped treat come in to say thank you. All these things make it work it.
So, medical laboratory science is for people who like science (yep), like to help people (yep) like doing something different every day (yep)…for me, most days I go to work and play in my lab – what could be more fun? 🙂
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Some days my job can be heaps of fun, other days not so much. On the fun days, I get to talk to lots of people, I get some exciting results, or I get to use some new equipment or visit a new lab.
Some days it can be rather boring, just having do the same thing over and over. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to have days like that so that you can have the good days where you get to do the fun stuff!
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yeah, some days it’s awesome, some days I just want to go home. With my work, it’s great because I do a little bit of work on the computer, some reading of science papers, some lab work, taking care of my cute little mice, writing science papers etc.
But some days, you have really big experiments that take 2 or 3 days and then in the end when you find out it didn’t work, you get frustrated! But it keeps it interesting! Most other jobs only required you to do one or maybe 2 different things every day, I do heaps of different things every day!
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From the outside, my job doesn’t look like a lot of fun; if you look at what I’m doing on any given day, I’m mostly sitting or standing at my desk, staring intently at a computer screen, typing furiously, reading a paper, or scribbling on a whiteboard. Much of it doesn’t look much different from a Dilbert cartoon! But the difference is in what I’m doing, and that is incredibly fun to me. I’m doing math to answer questions about biology and life, I’m reading about the accomplishments of other scientists and deciding how to use their findings in my own work, I’m writing computer programs that use these powerful devices to model everything from animal behaviour to the workings of viruses.
It’s a good life. 🙂
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