Busy Times

On Wednesday morning I got to the lab at 9:00 in the morning and luckily ran into Serene (my "mentor") after I got out of the elevators. Apparently, I was supposed to attend a meeting for the technicians with her. I didn't know where the meeting was so I just followed her through the maze of hallways to the Board Room.

Karen and Thor were both there (other technicians that have been there from 1-3 years) and so was Kerry our supervisor. Most of the meeting was about how they were going to go about training me. A lot of it was spent just talking. We watched a few funny movies from the Baldapalooza too since neither Karen nor Thor were able to attend that.

After the meeting I was sent up to work with the Document Control Specialist, Lindsay. She is pretty cool. I saw a few Brandon Sanderson novels on her desk so that served as an ice breaker and we seemed to get along really well. I spent four to five hours just reading documents and completing training modules on the computer.

Lindsay scheduled two appointments for me that afternoon. Ye Xiao is our Training Specialist and I spent more than an hour listening to her go through her part of the training process. She was difficult to listen to because English isn't her first language and she has a very strong Chinese accent. I tried my best to decipher everything she said, though, and for the most part I think I did fairly well.

After Ye Xiao introduced me to Ana Hooker (she is Pakistani or something) who is one of the "higher ups" in our division, she dropped me off at Missy's cubicle. Missy is the Quality Control Specialist. She deals with all of the problems and mistakes that our division makes in documentation and labeling... that sort of thing. By the time she was finished with her presentation for me, it was 16:00 and time to go.

Thursday was Thanksgiving and I was really excited to get paid for hanging out with everyone at Becca's. The joys of working full-time!

Today I actually got to spend some time in the laboratory. I followed Serene (my "mentor") around wherever she went and she explained everything she was doing in detail.

What the technicians do is mostly receiving specimens from both the automated track and manually. Then they sort the specimens into different racks depending on which tests have been ordered for those samples. They also prepare the runs for different tests and get tubes ready for DNA extraction. It's all very interesting to me. I don't go back in until Monday, but Serene said that I get to start doing "Pour-Offs" which means that I'll actually be handling the whole blood. I'm excited.

:)