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Has anyone here gotten an HTL certification through the ASCP? One more question, crossposted from the quick Med School thread, but has anyone here looked at/completed a pathologist assistant program? Currently I'm looking at Rosalind Franklin University in North Chicago. Asked in the other thread but it fell on deaf ears, apparently.
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Dec 3, 2014 21:56
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Cbear posted:Now I'm a Histology Technician working as a contractor for the NIH and its an amazing job. Oohh, care to give me more details on your career right now? Like I said before I'm en route to my HTL certification and may be going down the same path you have already trod, it seems.
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Dec 4, 2014 21:01
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Cbear posted:I think were actually on the same path. I basically will have a decent supervisor position once I get the certification. Yup, been working in my current lab for a year and some change. I'm going route 2 to get the certification, what about you? By "contractor for the NIH," do you mean you are basically contracted out to different labs, or are you stationary? If you want to swap emails/LinkedIns/whatever just shoot me a PM.
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Dec 4, 2014 23:47
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Cbear posted:I don't mind shooting the poo poo here unless people get annoyed or you want more specific email. BSL-4, phreow. The most that we've had in our lab was BSL-3, when we used to get rare cases of CJD. I'm in an Alzheimer's research center so 99% of my work has been with brains. I love it. How'd you get into working for the NIH, if you don't mind extrapolating? I'm looking right now at other histology technician jobs, primarily in clinical neurology settings, although I've got to get a more specific game-plan together for the coming year because I'm aiming to get accepted into a pathologist assistant program ASAP. I've thought about applying at MSN or RapidTemps because my friend mentioned it, but if I do that I'd probably have to delay trying to get into a graduate program as a PA. Decisions, decisions.
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Dec 5, 2014 16:23
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Anyone have experience with the Medical Staffing Network? I've got an information call tomorrow with one of their recruiters, I had a friend from the Vegas area refer me to them. A per diem/temporary/travel contract would actually be quite nice if I can make it gel with my currently unstable schedule..
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Mar 10, 2015 14:34
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Johnny Truant posted:Anyone have experience with the Medical Staffing Network? I've got an information call tomorrow with one of their recruiters, I had a friend from the Vegas area refer me to them. A per diem/temporary/travel contract would actually be quite nice if I can make it gel with my currently unstable schedule.. Guess I'll expand the question to staffing agencies in general? Just trying to feel out these kinds of places, seems kind of cool, honestly. 3-month contracts, traveling, flexible hours, sounds legit.
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Mar 16, 2015 16:49
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C-Euro posted:Day 1: This is too similar to my lab. Manager: Oh, your pico standard curve there isn't that great... try deleting a few of these data points(FROM THE CONTROL STANDARD), that should make it better. Me: ... 
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Apr 15, 2015 16:55
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kissekatt posted:qPCR Glad it's not just my lab! The head director of our lab has been telling us to drop everything and work on consolidating our freezers, so they'll be able to store ~175 brains instead of just ~60. So he tells us to completely stop distributions. Two days later he asks, "How come none of our distributions are going out!? That's where we get most of our funding from!" 
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Apr 17, 2015 15:31
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gninjagnome posted:Because what we really need is another software solution tacked on top of the other broken systems that we currently use. This will surely help our problems. Sounds like when our label printer's server crashed and burned(which was running on Windows 95...) so what did we do? Certainly not upgrade the whole system and get a new server-computer, oh no. We just went back to one version before it and kept on keepin' on. On the same Windows 95 computer.
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Jun 5, 2015 14:05
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As much as I love working with brains and all things pathology related... I think 'flavourist' is the coolest job title, and I want it. 
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Jun 26, 2015 15:41
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That moment where your IT department says they restored all your accessioned freezer sample databases only to find out that they restored everything... but only up to four months ago. Oh, and the restoration was spotty so they recommend a full audit on all our samples. 
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Aug 20, 2015 18:59
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Lyon posted:Damnnnnn that sucks. Are you working with human samples (I typically see the word accessioned used by our bio banking/cancer research customers)? Hopefully not because if you that's going to be extra brutal. How many freezers/samples are we talking about here? Yup, human samples. Preliminarily I've only seen major errors in three freezers, but sample wise? Could potentially be in the thousands. 
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Aug 21, 2015 13:26
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Being hungover and making gallons upon gallons of paraformaldehyde is awful
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Sep 10, 2015 20:57
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outlier posted:just staggered back to the lab and fell asleep on the floor. Ha, that's pretty great. I've been trying to convince my lab for the ~2 years I've been here to invest in a little folding cot for when we get called in at all hours of the night, but no dice yet. Completely unrelated, but does anyone have any experience with mold? More specifically my lab has had issues for a loooong time now about mold growing inside refrigerators we keep fixed tissue in, the boxes we keep the tissue in, the bags we keep the tissue in inside the box, and, yes, even on the tissue itself in a glycerol/DMSO cryoprotectant. We currently bleach the boxes and bags, scrub them with a brush, then give them a water rinse before going back into a cryoprotectant until we rinse again, then bag them up in fresh cryoprotectant, and we still are having issues. I mentioned it to my supervisor the other day, but I will handle upwards of 50 brains a day in various states of freshness/fixation, and that doesn't bug me, but then I see a giant moldblob and it's like 
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Sep 11, 2015 20:58
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Epitope posted:Uhg, mold is a bitch. We got rid of one fridge because it was too infected and we couldn't keep it from re-growing. We're looking into alternate storage methods, but for the foreseeable future we're going to be using the DMSO/glycerol mixture. Next time I pull a brain that's just -worthy I'll try to snap a photo so you can see how whack it gets. I never knew anaerobic mold would really love already fixed tissue. I don't even want to think about having to get rid of fridges though, there are some of ours that are reaching the more-mold-than-fridge point too quickly...Bastard Tetris posted:Get facilities to gas the gently caress out of it, then use sticky pads on the floor of every ingress point. Pretty sure I'm going to get to be the lucky sonofagun who, eventually, will do a deep clean of our fridges(hooray  ), but what do you mean sticky pads on the floor of the ingress points? Do you mean like weather sealing things, like what you put under your door to keep a draft from entering?
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Sep 15, 2015 14:33
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Phosphene posted:Hey mold buddy. We just had our walk in torn out and had our cleaning policies completely revamped. Guess who had to clean out the mold covered fridge! (You're welcome) Can't (not) wait till I can make this post! Spikes32 posted:Best suggestions I have for mold are using sporklenz or bleach, letting it sit, doing it again, cleaning again with ipa. And then continuing to do this deep clean on a monthly basis till the problem goes away. Is there anyway to seal off the brains any better so there is no way for the mold to get in? They're already double sealed in Kalpak bags, we get a mixture of aerobic and anaerobic mold. We're back on our very rigid bleaching/scrubbing protocol now that we have a new general lab/grossing room supervisor(thank god). C-Euro posted:Reminds me of a story one of the theoretical chemistry professors at my grad school (a pretty well-respected guy in his field) told me about why he became a theoretical chemist. When he was in college, lab safety was still at the point where you would pipette by mouth. One day he put too much effort in pippetting concentrated nitric acid Jesus christ, did he burn his tongue off or what?
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Sep 16, 2015 15:18
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Bastard Tetris posted:The mold has claimed you at this point, but you need tacky paper that people can walk over which will pull all the mold spores off their shoes or close airborne ones. I am pretty sure big places like fisher/vwr sell em. I have become one with the mould  I'm gonna look into this though, do you think they'd actually be preventative for upright refrigerators? I'm looking on Fisher and VWR right now but can't really narrow anything down past histological moulds, can anyone help me out with a better search term? I've tried, in combination with "mold", "paper" and "prevention," but neither of those have really narrowed it down.
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Oct 8, 2015 14:45
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That moment where you've been pressing both your direct supervisor and his supervisor(the entire lab manager) that we need more dry ice because of our freezer consolidation... only to see the exact same dry ice shipment arrive on Monday, and see that the same order is placed for Wednesday as well. Am I the only sane person here!?
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Oct 26, 2015 18:11
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On top of this weather royally screwing with my sinuses, I get a call about an external autopsy today at work. I go to my supervisor to ask where to find the protocol. They get uppity and say, "You've done one of these before, you should have this memorized. It's what we pay you for." Yes, I've done literally one type of this case, nine months ago. Sorry I don't have a perfect memory? But then to top it off, my supervisor says, "Oh wait, the <blahblah> study? I don't know that protocol, don't you have it? Oh here it is, but their protocol is wrong... I think? Yeah that gets transferred to pathology. Wait, no, we do it I think. Yes. No wait, we transfer it to Dr. Blahblah. No, no, we DO do it. At least you're getting paid!" ...so I get reprimanded for not remembering a very obscure(our lab has literally done one of these cases, since it's a fee for service) protocol I performed nine months ago, but my supervisor loses their protocol, forgets about the study entirely and gets snarky when questioned about it(this supervisor is who we contact with exactly the question I asked today) and... I'm supposed to respect this person as my lab supervisor? Really?
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Nov 18, 2015 00:27
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You know you love working in the lab when you get  over a new, adjustable, properly-sized-for-your-height bench stool.Happy new years, first post of the year booyakasha. 
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Jan 6, 2016 18:39
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Had a coworker have to google how to convert .96kg into g the other week.
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Jan 17, 2016 20:51
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Why is everything about the ASCP so bass-ackwards? 
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Jan 26, 2016 21:26
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outlier posted:Just a quick rant here: applied for an analyst / scientist job end of last year (in a big university translational medicine project) and got kicked back for being "overqualified". But they asked me (as in a personal call from the PI) to apply for another, more senior job in the same project. Cool. Interview went really well, they call for my references and I wait and wait and wait ... and they turn me down. Yup, sounds spot on. I basically had the exact same thing happen to me for a histotechnologist position, but the job they referred me to was in a completely different laboratory, and for cytotechnology. When I mentioned I wasn't a CTL they said that wouldn't be a problem. A month later... nope, we would prefer a CTL certified applicant, thanks for your time. It will forever be a mystery, the hiring process.
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Feb 24, 2016 15:11
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Is it weird I kind of sort of like the smell of glutaraldehyde?
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Mar 18, 2016 00:15
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I'm going to laugh at anyone who tries to tell me not to wear headphones in lab. You kidding me?
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Mar 24, 2016 21:42
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Scientastic posted:Wearing headphones in the lab is really bad. You're supposed to interact with your co-workers and talk to each other. If only we had volume control, or hell, even a pause button for our music... Or maybe just wear one earbud out? I can't even believe I'm having to say these things.
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Mar 25, 2016 00:14
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Y'all need to get better trained/coordinated coworkers then. One earbud out is perfectly acceptable. My old boss used to get on me cause I'd have both in and couldn't hear her... so I took one out. Only issues we've ever had with headphones in lab.
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Mar 25, 2016 14:01
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That Works posted:Ah yeah, proper training will teach someone to overcome a voluntary sensory impairment. That'll do it. Jesus christ, I never thought I would have to literally spell it out. Train them to only have one earbud in. This is not a complicated issue.
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Mar 25, 2016 22:54
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Bastard Tetris posted:Plus I'm older and go to lots of concerts so earbuds will probably just gently caress up my hearing. Uhhhhh what?
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Mar 29, 2016 16:29
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Me this week after realizing how much poo poo I have to fix because of my coworkers:  I love brains. Brain banks? Not so much...
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Apr 27, 2016 16:02
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Lt_Tofu posted:That's the dream. I am in an academic lab and finding any samples from previous people is almost impossible. Oh god, story of my lab. I recently did an inventory of one of our larger cryo tanks and found an entire rack with four completely full boxes of unreadable, some unlabeled, vials. Or one of our upright freezers that we nicknamed "the permafrost" since the top two shelves are literally completely full of frost/ice that has accumulated probably since we bought the drat thing, since nobody has defrosted it or checked either compressor. Or the ~15 boxes of notes from the previous lab manager, all just stuffed away on shelves above our spectrometer. Repeat ad infinitum...
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May 15, 2016 19:59
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Jesus christ, today I was reminded why DNA projects in our lab are just loving stupid. My old boss put it correctly: it's like chickens with their heads cut off trying to all coordinate. I just wanted to quantify, normalize and aliquot, but now I'm sucked into the shitshow that is creating a plating list, organizing our hundred some-odd samples which should've been organized in the first place, and having to play catchup because the tech extracting the DNA keeps giving me more samples than I can complete in one day, delaying the schedule. Not to mention our lab manager, who's rarely even in lab, for some reason told the PI we could ship out a week earlier than everyone initially said, even our loving department head. Someone please come kill me.
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Jun 10, 2016 18:28
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I heart bacon posted:I used to work for a guy who would say "Piss poor planning on your part does NOT constitute an emergency on mine." Ooh I'm totally stealing this when my old boss has a freak out.
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Jun 15, 2016 13:39
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Sundae posted:Can you expand on this? You get drug-tested every day? Probably means I heart bacon is the one doing the benchwork for the tests. All of the liquids I play with are colourless(certainly not odourless though...!) except when we're measuring DNA concentrations with flourescence. Then we use Pico Green, which is actually more of an amber hue. But it's photoreactive so I get to see its pretty colour for all of ten seconds while pipetting it...
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Jun 30, 2016 18:55
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The incompetence of one of my coworker's is seriously baffling to me. He has literally never once gone an entire organ harvesting without completely deviating from the protocol and also most likely loving up data for one of our most important studies I think all I've done my last few posts is post E/N poo poo here, my bad. But ugggghhhhh. Okay, done I promise. Question though, does anyone else use/make PBS(phosphate buffered saline) in their labs? Our protocol has us using sodium phosphate monobasic and dibasic, while in my histotech book I'm studying from every protocol uses potassium monobasic and sodium dibasic(might have the mono/di switched on those, not enough coffee in the world right now...). I know it's not a huge difference, but I'm wondering if that can make a legit difference in the quality of solutions, specifically paraformaldehyde, we use.
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Jul 25, 2016 14:19
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Antivehicular posted:I'm just a babby lab tech/research assistant, but we also use just one form of potassium phosphate and one form of sodium phosphate. I believe it's potassium mono, sodium di? So, yeah, probably in accordance with your histology textbook. Yeah I'm wondering why we're using Na/Na instead of K/Na. Definitely gonna bring it up with my supervisor. I could maybe see some explanation if we were looking at potassium pumps/channels in neurons, but... we're not, haha. Maybe I can point it out and look good to my supervisor 
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Jul 25, 2016 16:07
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Get switched temporarily to work in our histology side, get huge slide distribution project that's priority... ...run out of loving slide labels. Our histology department is incompetent as gently caress, jfc.
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Sep 19, 2016 15:34
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Bastard Tetris posted:I don't even know where to start with your situation, holy poo poo. They're not supposed to get here till next Monday Right now we're hand labeling the slides until we can get the labels in so we can print the proper ones. So basically we're doing something twice, wasting a whole bunch of time! Edit: So for a change of pace and NOT to complain about my lab, is anybody here a member of the ASCP? Just trying to figure out if the membership is worth it or not. Their next conference is in Chicago, where I live, so that'd be super dope to go to.. Johnny Truant fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 22, 2016 14:28
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I've been using a pair of Sketcher's work shoes for approximately one year and I'm a huge fan.
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Sep 30, 2016 02:31
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And my HR person is trying to stiff me on reimbursement for my certification exam as well as the study materials. How the gently caress is an HTL certification not relevant in a neurohistopathology lab? gently caress this.
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Sep 30, 2016 17:57
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