It’s National Medical Laboratory Professionals Week once again!
How are my fellow lab rats celebrating? I’ve got a new job that’s not in a hospital, and I’m told they don’t do much for lab week, but I’m going to get the ball rolling by making antibody-shaped cookies and bringing in some lab-related word games. I’ve also got a week’s worth of lab posts prepared for my blog*, and I’m very excited about sharing them with my non-lab friends, as a way to promote and explain the profession.
If you’re a laboratory professional, keep up the good work!
If you’re not, then consider looking up the profession and learning about what we do. Or ask us! We’re mostly very nerdy and enthusiastic about our work and love to share.
*I’ll share my blog here if anyone wants me to - I don’t want to seem attention-whore-y or break any rules.
Here’s a link to my blog - it’s not all about lab and blood stuff, but I hope to post daily this week and keep it all lab-related. If you click on the “lab” or “blood” tags, you can see some of my older lab-related posts. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments on there.
The CSMLS actually seems to be trying to attack our visibility problem this year - they sent everyone in the lab a CSMLS T-shirt along with a bunch of posters, bracelets, pins, pamphlets, etc. to hand out. They also gave me money to have a pizza party for the staff!
Check out the commercial that they are/were planning to run nationwide.
That’s pretty awesome! We’re making our own Lab Week without outside help, since almost nobody knows our lab exists, and that’s ok. Yesterday, I brought in a cake (instead of cookies) decorated with licorice antibodies, someone brought in bagels today, one of our vendors is buying us sandwiches tomorrow, and I think the boss is buying us pizza on Friday. Lab week makes me fat.
I’m doing my part to promote the profession on my blog this week and I’m getting an encouraging number of visits. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. I don’t care if nobody reads my recipes or my musings on that blog, but if my lab posts were being ignored, I’d be pretty sad.
I need an idea for Friday’s and Saturday’s posts. Any suggestions?
Coincidentally, I do have a suggestion for a blog post!
I was reading this article that is based off of talks done by the INVENTOR of the modern chemistry autoanalyzer. It might be neat to compare the SMA 12/60 to what we have now - I see you have a Beckman line (LX20 Pros with DXi’s?)
I’m soon to join your ranks, ladies and gents! I’ve applied to the Med Tech program at Univ of Washington and I’ll find out this week or next whether or not I’m accepted. It’ll be Med Tech for me one way or the other, but sheesh muneesh, I hope it’s in Seattle.
I’ll be reading your blog, Antigen. Thanks for the link!