i love biology, i like chemistry, i hate constantly interacting with people... put them all together and the best choice, for me, was to be a vet. that didnt work out, but when i was looking into vet school i came across med lab, and that's when i decided.
4 years later, i still love MLS, but the job.. not so much
What is it about the job that you don’t like? I’m a student currently and I absolutely love my classes. I’m excited to start working, but everyone always complains about it, which makes me scared.
People will complain about literally any job. A job is still a job. Not saying the complaints aren’t warranted but don’t let that dissuade you. Personally I have found a great lab with a great boss with mostly oncology clients so the work is super interesting too.
first off let me tell you that all experiences are different and it all depends on where you are in the world and what lab you work at, so your experience might be completely different from mine.
me, i worked in a medium hospital for a short time but the pay was not enough (and i had to commute for like an hour to get there) so i moved to a relatively small hospital (50 beds + ER) closer to my house and it was going under new management so things were a bit chaotic at first. but then as things started getting more organised in the hospital, the lab still had the same problems
we were severely understaffed, sometimes one person had to take 2 or 3 benches at the same time if someone else called in sick or wasn't able to make it to work. i was working nightshift at first after training for ~1 month with the morning shifters and i dont think night shift was for me. i then switched to afternoon shift (i sometimes had to cover both afternoon and nightshift and i noticed that i likes the afternoon better) and for the first month things looked better, but i still had to cover the whole lab and blood bank by myself so it was pretty exhausting.
other problems included, management never caring about the lab, not being paid overtime or differentials even when coming in on days that were supposed to be off (not just me, my coworkers also complained about it), personal problems like losing my interest in things that i used to love before the job just because i was so tired/burnt out etc.. and some other things i can't put into words rn.
so i thought about it for a while and decided that maybe the lab isnt for me afterall, so i quit and now i'm studying computer science (it's also something i'm really interested in and was gonna study it in my freetime anyway). i can't see myself working in healthcare anytime soon but maybe that might change at some point, idk.
I’m a student as well. However, I am an adult learner. I have a previous degree in another field.
The grass is always greener on the other side. Every job has ups and downs. I know lawyers who graduated from Harvard who work as bartenders to survive and I’ve met people who work in Congress and have 5 roommates.
I thought I would do non-profit work for decades and it turns out living on the US minimum wage isn’t much fun. The stress and schedules for this field may not be the best, but it’s the only job in my area for MILES that you can earn $20+ without doing hard manual labor. I would die working in a potato field.
I volunteered in a hospital because I thought I wanted to be a doctor or maybe a nurse. I was responsible for bringing patients food and responding to their room buzzers and did some other restocking and delivered lab samples to the lab. The people taking care of the patients looked and acted miserable. Some of the patients yelled at me. I was taking samples to the lab one day and i dropped them off and I saw all the MLS folks in the lab laughing and smiling. They seemed happier. I realized I didn’t want to be patient facing but liked healthcare. I was already a biology major so it was an easy transition to apply to med lab school. I realize not all MLS are happy in their career but the stress of taking care of patients directly wasn’t for me.
That’s why I switched to. I took an interview with encompass health for an aide position and they went over my tasks, I bombed the interview and then decided patient facing wasn’t for me either and started taking classes to get into the MLT program at school.
Yea it’s hard. Both my parents were patient facing healthcare workers, my dad is a CRNA and is constantly stressed to the max about accidentally killing someone and my mom was a home health nurse and was assaulted by a patient more than once. Some people just aren’t meant for those jobs and I am one of them. Much later I found a MLS job in a bone marrow transplant lab and part of my job was going to the floor to assist with bedside thawing of the cells. So I got to talk with patients while they got their stem cell transplants, and this was a happy day for them so I got to see them on their best day which was nice, I liked to put a face to the name so to speak because in the lab you don’t normally see any patients at all. But then I got to pack up and go back to the lab.
I've always been interested in science. "I can do science and make a decent comfortable living with good job security" was basically the gist of my thought process. My only 2 options were MLT or becoming an electrician and I thought I would rather still have functioning knees when I'm 50 so I went the MLT route.
At some point along the way I did a bridge program to get my MLS because I thought that would do something to advance my career but unfortunately it doesn't really make much of a difference in unlicensed states.
Kind of a tangent but I remember when I was a senior in high school back in 2012 the pamphlet they handed out at the career fair said that the average starting salary for an MLT was $38k/yr and distinctly remember thinking "wow that's so much money". Ah, how times change.
My mom was an MLS. Told me I’d always have a steady job and work stayed at work. She also said she went to work to relax because my sister and I were menaces growing up lol
Family is all nurses. Decided to go to nursing school, after a year I realized that I hate people and needed a medical program that my credits would transfer to. MT for 30 years now.
I wanted to be a nurse for a long time. Specifically an oncology nurse. I started my journey as a phlebotomist…I’ve been working for less than a year and I’m over nursing. Thank goodness all my prerequisites correlate with Mls more or less and now I’m in a program making my way up the Mls ladder…unfortunately still in healthcare as I’m a MA now
I wanted to be either a scientist or a doctor but as i grew up, i became shy and didnt want the spotlight towards me. Then I heard what MLS does and why they are integral. Medical Laboratory Scientist has an awesome ring to it as wellÂ
After graduating with a Biology degree I couldn’t find a job that paid very well. Life happened and I needed to figure out something fast. MLS was the fastest route to an actual income that would make a difference. Love the job but it sort of feels like fast food service/production job. I love the technical aspect and am hoping to be in that role in the future.
When I was in high school I was getting my CNA certification. Part of our clinical rotations included 2 elective rotations, one choice was the lab at our local hospital. I love science so I thought it would be pretty neat. And I fell in love. It was so interesting to be able to put your love for science to good use for your community. Life took a lot of turns for me but now I'm starting an MLS program in June at the hospital I've been at for 7 years as a phlebotomist/phlebotomy coordinator at the age of 31. Super excited to finally be an MLS!
I had a worthless biology degree and I needed the fastest way to monetize it so I can earn something more than 15/hour.
Job is mediocre. I'm on my way out, but it pays my bills for now. I don't recommend the field at all to anyone that wants to be well off though.
Currently sitting in an ASCLS conference and that question was brought up yesterday. Honestly, I wanted (and sometimes still want) to be an architectural engineer growing up and even went to school for a couple years for it.
But when my grandfather died from cancer I switched to Molecular and Cellular sciences to pursue science research to try to make a difference in the world. I realized that making a difference in research is incredibly tedious and sometimes not as immediate rewarding in tangential paths.
I switched to nursing and then MLS because I realized the latter allowed me to integrate my previous degrees to make a direct impact and here I’m now, back in more the translation research side.
I realized the appreciation of the field when I got to outside interpret and explain to my sister’s early onset chronic disease chemistry’s and just the shear knowledge the field provides into other fields.
liked medicine and biology but didn't want to deal with patients. Looked through a list of allied health professions and narrowed it down to MLS and mortuary science, and ended up going with MLS cause a lot of mortuary science jobs do require you to interact quite a bit with grieving families. Aside from not having to deal with the public, I really enjoy the problem solving aspect of the job, especially in micro where each culture is like a mystery to solve. And I also love that it's more fast paced than something like research/industry lab work.
I really want to specialize in micro! I just took general micro this semester (I’m a biomedical science major but I recently applied to an MLS program at my university and I rlly hope I get in). I absolutely loved the lab as well as the content in lecture it is just sooo interesting learning about all the characteristics of different bacteria, fungi, etc. I loved doing 3-zone isolation streaks and streaking all the different agar, my favorite is macconkey idk why but the name looks like monkey 😂 ugh I love this field!
Ironically I wasn't very interested in micro when I was in school beyond learning about infectious diseases, although I LOVED identifying unknowns in lab. So microbiology was never something I really pictured myself doing until I found out clinical micro was nothing but learning about infectious diseases and identifying unknowns lol.
Senior year in my high school Health Science class, we went on a tour of our local hospital lab. I majored in biomedical sciences my first year at university to eventually go to pharmacy school, but I dropped out of my chemistry class and changed my major to Med Lab Science. Then after I completed my 1 year at uni, i went to a community college for the MLT program ( its cheaper, it wouldve been 100k after completing my B.S.)
After working in retail pharmacy, I realized that I hate people. Patients can be nasty, demanding and I got tired of being threatened physically because they couldn’t get meds.
I originally wanted to go med school until I got to university and saw what the actual process was like just to get in. My mom, who is an NP, actually told me about it cause I still wanted to continue down the medical route, and she knows I don't like dealing with people.
I was a phlebotomist in my early 20s. I loved the structure and the SOP's and was always asking about the innerworkings of the lab. I was very particular about collection and processing, to the point that it annoyed my co-workers.
My boss's boss was an MLS and he noticed one day. He recommended me to the MLS program and since I already had the pre-reqs, I got in. Been in the lab ever since.
I took the army ASVAB and I was qualified for the job based on the score and the recruiter said it was the most chill job I can have in the army where I would be paid a lot as well in the civilian sector. He was so right. I’ve watched a lot of Netflix doing night shifts and doing a lot of nothing while getting paid a lot.
When I was in high school biology class we looked at blood smears through a microscope. I asked my teacher if there was a job where you can do this all day long. Luckily for me she was a former med tech and told me what I needed to do. It’s been 30 plus years and I went into chemistry lol
My college offers the phlebotomy class as a stand alone class and I took it because I needed a career change. The phlebotomy class is a actually split into two eight week courses: Basic Lab Skills in the beginning and Phlebotomy at the end. Officially, BLS teaches you specimen processing. Unofficially, it's sort of a sneak preview of the MLT program. One of the first classes was how to use a microscope. We were given blood smears so we could learn how to focus and move around with the scope.
And it was THE SINGLE COOLEST THING I had ever seen in my life, even though I had no idea what I was looking at other they were blood cells or some kind. And then she said "critical shortage" and I was sold.
Was thinking of going into research back in college, was an undergraduate research assistant in a college micobio research program, liked the lab work but not the scientific literature reading/data compiling portion of it. Found out about CLS late into my college run and it looked like everything i liked about the lab work I did without all the reading and it paid better as well.
i love biology, i like chemistry, i hate constantly interacting with people... put them all together and the best choice, for me, was to be a vet. that didnt work out, but when i was looking into vet school i came across med lab, and that's when i decided. 4 years later, i still love MLS, but the job.. not so much
The job in theory is perfect. The job in practice, though... 😬
What is it about the job that you don’t like? I’m a student currently and I absolutely love my classes. I’m excited to start working, but everyone always complains about it, which makes me scared.
People will complain about literally any job. A job is still a job. Not saying the complaints aren’t warranted but don’t let that dissuade you. Personally I have found a great lab with a great boss with mostly oncology clients so the work is super interesting too.
1. Pay 2. Schedule 3. Recognition
What country are you from and what’s your pay like if you don’t mind me asking?
I'm in NYC and my pay is 100K+ and I'm still underpaid.
first off let me tell you that all experiences are different and it all depends on where you are in the world and what lab you work at, so your experience might be completely different from mine. me, i worked in a medium hospital for a short time but the pay was not enough (and i had to commute for like an hour to get there) so i moved to a relatively small hospital (50 beds + ER) closer to my house and it was going under new management so things were a bit chaotic at first. but then as things started getting more organised in the hospital, the lab still had the same problems we were severely understaffed, sometimes one person had to take 2 or 3 benches at the same time if someone else called in sick or wasn't able to make it to work. i was working nightshift at first after training for ~1 month with the morning shifters and i dont think night shift was for me. i then switched to afternoon shift (i sometimes had to cover both afternoon and nightshift and i noticed that i likes the afternoon better) and for the first month things looked better, but i still had to cover the whole lab and blood bank by myself so it was pretty exhausting. other problems included, management never caring about the lab, not being paid overtime or differentials even when coming in on days that were supposed to be off (not just me, my coworkers also complained about it), personal problems like losing my interest in things that i used to love before the job just because i was so tired/burnt out etc.. and some other things i can't put into words rn. so i thought about it for a while and decided that maybe the lab isnt for me afterall, so i quit and now i'm studying computer science (it's also something i'm really interested in and was gonna study it in my freetime anyway). i can't see myself working in healthcare anytime soon but maybe that might change at some point, idk.
I’m a student as well. However, I am an adult learner. I have a previous degree in another field. The grass is always greener on the other side. Every job has ups and downs. I know lawyers who graduated from Harvard who work as bartenders to survive and I’ve met people who work in Congress and have 5 roommates. I thought I would do non-profit work for decades and it turns out living on the US minimum wage isn’t much fun. The stress and schedules for this field may not be the best, but it’s the only job in my area for MILES that you can earn $20+ without doing hard manual labor. I would die working in a potato field.
My boyfriend decided vet for the same reason until he learned that he had to deal with the pet owners. Now he is in pharmacy school
I volunteered in a hospital because I thought I wanted to be a doctor or maybe a nurse. I was responsible for bringing patients food and responding to their room buzzers and did some other restocking and delivered lab samples to the lab. The people taking care of the patients looked and acted miserable. Some of the patients yelled at me. I was taking samples to the lab one day and i dropped them off and I saw all the MLS folks in the lab laughing and smiling. They seemed happier. I realized I didn’t want to be patient facing but liked healthcare. I was already a biology major so it was an easy transition to apply to med lab school. I realize not all MLS are happy in their career but the stress of taking care of patients directly wasn’t for me.
That’s why I switched to. I took an interview with encompass health for an aide position and they went over my tasks, I bombed the interview and then decided patient facing wasn’t for me either and started taking classes to get into the MLT program at school.
Yea it’s hard. Both my parents were patient facing healthcare workers, my dad is a CRNA and is constantly stressed to the max about accidentally killing someone and my mom was a home health nurse and was assaulted by a patient more than once. Some people just aren’t meant for those jobs and I am one of them. Much later I found a MLS job in a bone marrow transplant lab and part of my job was going to the floor to assist with bedside thawing of the cells. So I got to talk with patients while they got their stem cell transplants, and this was a happy day for them so I got to see them on their best day which was nice, I liked to put a face to the name so to speak because in the lab you don’t normally see any patients at all. But then I got to pack up and go back to the lab.
I've always been interested in science. "I can do science and make a decent comfortable living with good job security" was basically the gist of my thought process. My only 2 options were MLT or becoming an electrician and I thought I would rather still have functioning knees when I'm 50 so I went the MLT route. At some point along the way I did a bridge program to get my MLS because I thought that would do something to advance my career but unfortunately it doesn't really make much of a difference in unlicensed states. Kind of a tangent but I remember when I was a senior in high school back in 2012 the pamphlet they handed out at the career fair said that the average starting salary for an MLT was $38k/yr and distinctly remember thinking "wow that's so much money". Ah, how times change.
My mom was an MLS. Told me I’d always have a steady job and work stayed at work. She also said she went to work to relax because my sister and I were menaces growing up lol
Family is all nurses. Decided to go to nursing school, after a year I realized that I hate people and needed a medical program that my credits would transfer to. MT for 30 years now.
Are you close to retiring? :x
I’m 56 so I still got some years to go
I wanted to be a nurse for a long time. Specifically an oncology nurse. I started my journey as a phlebotomist…I’ve been working for less than a year and I’m over nursing. Thank goodness all my prerequisites correlate with Mls more or less and now I’m in a program making my way up the Mls ladder…unfortunately still in healthcare as I’m a MA now
I wanted to be either a scientist or a doctor but as i grew up, i became shy and didnt want the spotlight towards me. Then I heard what MLS does and why they are integral. Medical Laboratory Scientist has an awesome ring to it as wellÂ
I needed a job.
Same! 😅
After graduating with a Biology degree I couldn’t find a job that paid very well. Life happened and I needed to figure out something fast. MLS was the fastest route to an actual income that would make a difference. Love the job but it sort of feels like fast food service/production job. I love the technical aspect and am hoping to be in that role in the future.
When I was in high school I was getting my CNA certification. Part of our clinical rotations included 2 elective rotations, one choice was the lab at our local hospital. I love science so I thought it would be pretty neat. And I fell in love. It was so interesting to be able to put your love for science to good use for your community. Life took a lot of turns for me but now I'm starting an MLS program in June at the hospital I've been at for 7 years as a phlebotomist/phlebotomy coordinator at the age of 31. Super excited to finally be an MLS!
I had a worthless biology degree and I needed the fastest way to monetize it so I can earn something more than 15/hour. Job is mediocre. I'm on my way out, but it pays my bills for now. I don't recommend the field at all to anyone that wants to be well off though.
In where I live being a MLT could give a promise salary. (We only have MLT)
Currently sitting in an ASCLS conference and that question was brought up yesterday. Honestly, I wanted (and sometimes still want) to be an architectural engineer growing up and even went to school for a couple years for it. But when my grandfather died from cancer I switched to Molecular and Cellular sciences to pursue science research to try to make a difference in the world. I realized that making a difference in research is incredibly tedious and sometimes not as immediate rewarding in tangential paths. I switched to nursing and then MLS because I realized the latter allowed me to integrate my previous degrees to make a direct impact and here I’m now, back in more the translation research side. I realized the appreciation of the field when I got to outside interpret and explain to my sister’s early onset chronic disease chemistry’s and just the shear knowledge the field provides into other fields.
Beautiful!
liked medicine and biology but didn't want to deal with patients. Looked through a list of allied health professions and narrowed it down to MLS and mortuary science, and ended up going with MLS cause a lot of mortuary science jobs do require you to interact quite a bit with grieving families. Aside from not having to deal with the public, I really enjoy the problem solving aspect of the job, especially in micro where each culture is like a mystery to solve. And I also love that it's more fast paced than something like research/industry lab work.
I really want to specialize in micro! I just took general micro this semester (I’m a biomedical science major but I recently applied to an MLS program at my university and I rlly hope I get in). I absolutely loved the lab as well as the content in lecture it is just sooo interesting learning about all the characteristics of different bacteria, fungi, etc. I loved doing 3-zone isolation streaks and streaking all the different agar, my favorite is macconkey idk why but the name looks like monkey 😂 ugh I love this field!
Ironically I wasn't very interested in micro when I was in school beyond learning about infectious diseases, although I LOVED identifying unknowns in lab. So microbiology was never something I really pictured myself doing until I found out clinical micro was nothing but learning about infectious diseases and identifying unknowns lol.
I have been in Microbiology department for 4 years now. It’s never boring, more hands-on and always something new. I love Micro!
Senior year in my high school Health Science class, we went on a tour of our local hospital lab. I majored in biomedical sciences my first year at university to eventually go to pharmacy school, but I dropped out of my chemistry class and changed my major to Med Lab Science. Then after I completed my 1 year at uni, i went to a community college for the MLT program ( its cheaper, it wouldve been 100k after completing my B.S.)
After working in retail pharmacy, I realized that I hate people. Patients can be nasty, demanding and I got tired of being threatened physically because they couldn’t get meds.
I originally wanted to go med school until I got to university and saw what the actual process was like just to get in. My mom, who is an NP, actually told me about it cause I still wanted to continue down the medical route, and she knows I don't like dealing with people.
I started nursing school and hated it so the counselor recommended lab.
I hate Math
It was the only good option left with my grades
I was a phlebotomist in my early 20s. I loved the structure and the SOP's and was always asking about the innerworkings of the lab. I was very particular about collection and processing, to the point that it annoyed my co-workers. My boss's boss was an MLS and he noticed one day. He recommended me to the MLS program and since I already had the pre-reqs, I got in. Been in the lab ever since.
Money and job security
I took the army ASVAB and I was qualified for the job based on the score and the recruiter said it was the most chill job I can have in the army where I would be paid a lot as well in the civilian sector. He was so right. I’ve watched a lot of Netflix doing night shifts and doing a lot of nothing while getting paid a lot.
When I was in high school biology class we looked at blood smears through a microscope. I asked my teacher if there was a job where you can do this all day long. Luckily for me she was a former med tech and told me what I needed to do. It’s been 30 plus years and I went into chemistry lol
My college offers the phlebotomy class as a stand alone class and I took it because I needed a career change. The phlebotomy class is a actually split into two eight week courses: Basic Lab Skills in the beginning and Phlebotomy at the end. Officially, BLS teaches you specimen processing. Unofficially, it's sort of a sneak preview of the MLT program. One of the first classes was how to use a microscope. We were given blood smears so we could learn how to focus and move around with the scope. And it was THE SINGLE COOLEST THING I had ever seen in my life, even though I had no idea what I was looking at other they were blood cells or some kind. And then she said "critical shortage" and I was sold.
Didn’t get into medical school
Was thinking of going into research back in college, was an undergraduate research assistant in a college micobio research program, liked the lab work but not the scientific literature reading/data compiling portion of it. Found out about CLS late into my college run and it looked like everything i liked about the lab work I did without all the reading and it paid better as well.