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“I always knew that
coming back to school was what I was supposed to do,” says
Melissa Smith, 37, married and the mother of two.
“I knew that coming back to school was the only way I could get
the job I wanted.”
The job she’s always wanted is the job she’s doing now, working
at Hutcheson Medical Center in Ft. Oglethorpe in the Medical
Lab. Currently, she’s a student in Dalton State’s Medical
Laboratory Technician (MLT) program fulfilling course
requirements by performing unpaid rotations at the hospital, but
she hopes to be fully employed once she graduates this December.
“Every day when I go in to work, I just love it. I feel like I’m
doing something that I enjoy, which I haven’t always felt in
jobs that I’ve had before.”
Smith, a graduate of the Walker Public School System, attended
Dalton State when she was a recent high school graduate in the
early 1990s, but she didn’t feel as if she had found her life’s
direction at the time.
“I left school after a while and began waitressing and
bartending,” she says. “It’s not something I ever wanted to do,
but that’s the way life worked out. Years later, I wanted to get
back into something I really liked that I could earn a living
doing.”
Her road to self discovery included remembering how much she’d
enjoyed classes like microbiology during her first go-round in
college.
“A long time ago, I took a microbiology class and loved it. And
then I took other classes that were similar and found that I
loved those, too.” |
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What Smith particularly loves, she says, is “figuring out why a
patient is sick.” “When I can find out what’s wrong, what’s
going on with the patient, it makes me really happy. So many
people come into the hospital and end up having their blood
drawn, and samples are then taken to the lab. They don’t
understand what’s going on sometimes. I like being involved in
the process.”
According to Doris Shoemaker, Education Coordinator of the MLT
Program at Dalton State, Smith is a stellar student, and she
praised Smith for receiving a $1,000 scholarship from the
American Society of Clinical Laboratory Sciences (ASCLS) and
Alpha Mu Tau.
“This is a very competitive scholarship, with not more than 10
given nationwide,” Shoemaker says. “It’s based on grades and
other factors, so we’re very proud of Melissa for receiving it.”
Smith says the scholarship is helping out at a time when the
economy is tough and when demands on her time are challenging as
well. As the mother of children aged six and three, Smith
juggles the responsibilities of home and clinical rotations,
which take place at the hospital on weekdays between 7:00 am and
3:00 pm.
During this series of clinical rotations, which began in July,
Smith will spend five weeks in hematology, four weeks in
chemistry, six weeks in microbiology, and five weeks in blood
banking. Once she graduates, she’ll be able to work in hospital
labs and clinics and for private industry as well, which often
hires MLTs to do quality control work on site.
Like Smith, Shoemaker finds the field of Medical Lab Technology
to be exciting and rewarding.
“Every day is different, every cell is different, every patient
is different,” remarks Shoemaker. “The phone is always ringing
in the lab, tests are being run continually. There’s always
something going on.”
Smith plans to continue in this field for as long as possible,
and she plans to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Medical
Laboratory Technology in the near future.
Smith predicts that she’ll always prefer the hands-on approach,
viewing slides under a microscope rather than being a
supervisor.
“I hope that in 10 years I’ll still be working ‘on the bench,’”
she says.
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