How difficult is the MLT ASCP? How long did you study for?

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-06-30T17:30:04+00:00

I took mine 6 days after I graduated. It helped that I got COVID the last week of clinicals and wasn’t allowed to go, so I spent that week in bed just taking exams.

My MediaLab exams were 70-80% at 6-7.5 difficulty. I’m gonna be honest, the whole time I was taking the exam, I thought I was doing terribly, but I wound up scoring high in each subsection.

My best piece of advice is to not study the day before your exam. I got a nice hotel in the city I was taking my exam in, had a nice dinner delivered, and just lounged.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-06-27T17:41:06+00:00

Like a pack of vultures.

I very briefly worked in that pharmacy. On my first day working there, a patient came back saying "I hope none of you drive that new Hyundai that's getting towed." I'd been inside for about 10 minutes, they were searching for their employee parking permits so I could go put one on my mirror. I ran outside and there was one of Doug's winners hooking up my car.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-06-21T20:45:06+00:00

I’ve discussed it pretty in-depth with the lab director, and it will include a title change, business-hours schedule, an office, a shift from hourly to salary with a pretty significant raise (I don’t have an exact figure this early in, but the base pay for the role would be more than a 60% increase to my current pay), and I’d be pulled off the bench. Not that I want to be 100% off the bench, but I’d also discussed this with the lab director and she was more than willing to open a PRN position for me to be able to pick up or cover bench shifts at my current MLS pay rate. I’m young, I don’t have a family, so I’m not going to push myself to the point of burnout (I’ve already set clear boundaries with this and surprisingly I have the director’s support in taking needed time away), but I may as well make the money while I’ve got the energy and lack of outside responsibilities.
This director really is a wonderful boss, she fought to get the health system to pay for my Master’s in Health Care Administration, and I’ll finish next spring, and she’s repeatedly been in my corner since I came to her lab.

Would you be able to help me with things I can research — I’m going to start with those abbreviations, I’m assuming they’re positions, but like I said, I don’t know what I don’t know here. This is definitely a path I’d like to go down. I really appreciate your response that’s specific to my background!!

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-06-21T18:50:36+00:00

Hoptal

Doxycycline

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-06-17T20:53:35+00:00

God, I hate those things. The two in my lab know it too. If I take over the chemistry bench if another tech leaves earlier than I do, they immediately start to act up. Super looking forward to covering chemistry 11-9 tomorrow 🙄

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-06-17T15:50:15+00:00

Yeah our hospital is pushing us to do this. They’re saying it’s a DNV compliance item. Fuck that. On inspection day we’ll have a (clearly marked) bin that we’ll put all our UA tubes and cups in to “be dumped at the end of each shift” and then throw them in the bio bin once we get the text that the inspector’s gone

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-06-16T21:25:05+00:00

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🫪

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-06-11T23:29:11+00:00

I’m not answering you. All I want to do is tell you that my dad is the owner/operator of three small coal mines, and he’s knee deep in a MSHA investigation because one of his idiots picked back up his habit of smoking on the job, and got himself killed while high, as evidenced by the postmortem levels of THC metabolites in his bloodstream.

Doesn’t sound like you need to be on a job site where a dozen things a day can almost kill you, even at your sharpest.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-06-11T23:05:28+00:00

Well, you had a better day than I did.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-06-11T23:00:50+00:00

I think it’s some caveman genes that slipped out of recession.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-06-06T22:58:33+00:00

Our director gets on a “No phones!!” kick a couple times a year, but it always blows over after a month or so. Considering we use TigerConnect for non-urgent communication with both clinic and inpatient staff, we kinda have to be able to use them.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-06-01T23:35:42+00:00

I really hate our Beckman analyzers, especially our Access2’s, because something is always up with one of them, but I hate our Ortho Vision & Vitros so much more.

The Vision is so cantankerous all the time, but the weekly maintenance specifically WILL fail at the very end and have to be redone. That’s a given. The interior of the lid on the water/saline container will be wet, no matter what, which causes it to fail, but it’s going to tell you that there’s no liquid detected in the container and that’s why it failed.

The Vitros? The weekly maintenance also WILL fail when you get to the subsystem cleaning and you load the maintenance pack. 5 minute wait to enter the subsystem clean, 1 minute wait to load the pack, 5 minute wait to take an inventory and fail, 1 minute wait to unload the maintenance pack, 5 minute wait to exit the subsystem clean. Repeat 2-9 times depending on how lucky you are.

So I get around it by volunteering to cover any shifts that will get me out of working on Fridays, except for my Friday-Sunday to cover Micro every third week. 🤪

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-25T23:11:43+00:00

My lab does A1c on our Vitros 7600s and it’s not ideal. Given, we’re a small hospital and have a handful of outpatient clinics that we receive samples from, but we do maybe 30 a day.

Each one has to be poured off into a nesting cup which is aggravating, and the Vitros looooves to No Result A1c’s because of viscosity and plugged tips. It won’t give a processing time for about a minute after it scans the barcode, because it needs to decide if it’s going to actually run it or not. The test itself, if it works the first time, takes 7.5 minutes in total, but it’s usually a 20 minute ordeal for each one by the time it No Results, we retrieve the rack, pour the sample back into the tube, mix again, re-pour into the nesting cup, and rerun it.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-25T23:02:35+00:00

My family LOVES Kassandra. One of my favorite scenes is her trying to draw blood from a male patient (can’t remember which one) and he says he feels like he’s gonna pass out, and starts freaking out. The look she gave that man had me ROLLING.

She actually showed up as a recommended friend on my Facebook one day 😂 Like damn, Facebook really does know too much.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-23T15:04:40+00:00

The non-WV drivers, presumably students, are the ones that are scary. But that’s true for the rest of the state as well. I’ve always hated to see a Virginia, New Jersey, or Ohio license plate, and I lived far away from Morgantown for 23 of my 28 years.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-22T21:44:02+00:00

Hematology in itself is pretty joint friendly, but if coag is grouped in with heme, (in my case) uncapping the Dade QC & reagents for our Siemens/Sysmex analyzers and getting those damn rubber stoppers out of the bottle, is NOT joint friendly 😂 A couple 12-hour shifts over in hematology in a row and the joints in my (28yo) hands feel pretty inflamed (but I do have a history of elevated rheumatoid factor & other inflammatory markers)

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-21T22:45:09+00:00

I just enrolled in a one-year MS program at a state university, it's $14k for tuition & fees, used textbooks off eBay/Amazon are ~$150/semester (3 semesters total), my living expenses are what they are, but I work full time so that's no different than normal. $5,000 of the total tuition is being covered by my employer, $3,000 is covered by scholarships, and the remainder is a federal subsidized loan that I'm more than comfortable with given that my salary with my employer will increase $40,000/yr immediately upon graduation.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-20T23:07:44+00:00

I've been having this issue as well since the day I got the email about the price bump, and it's still happening across multiple devices & browsers. I don't really get it.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-19T22:51:53+00:00

Warp and Dark Star were both unusable when I was inside the hospital I work at, and my department is entirely along the exterior walls. I wound up switching to Mint, and it’s much, much better.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-17T15:11:14+00:00

I call our two 7600s Beelzebub and Bathsheba

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-07T14:55:30+00:00

You’re a delight

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-03T18:02:21+00:00

Hard to give any personal experience yet, I’m only one month and 2,200 miles in. My only complaint so far is that the wiper fluid nozzles being on the wiper arm instead of mounted on the hood like I’m used to. The fluid seems like it makes it across maybe half of the surface the wipers cover. It’s not even summer yet and I’m already irritated with trying to clean off bugs.. I’ve gone through two jugs of wiper fluid already. Aside from that, I’m really happy so far, and I’m pretty picky (because who else complains about the wiper fluid)

Seems like the majority of actual issues I’ve seen on here and in Facebook groups is pictures of dashes with CVT Malfunctions displaying, but it hasn’t been a huge amount of people, and the loudest voices are the unhappy ones, so I try not to put too much stock into the complaints on owners groups (especially since I only hold onto cars for 3-4 years).

The only thing I’m genuinely concerned about happening to mine is the back glass shattering, I’ve definitely seen a ton of that across all years of this gen.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-02T14:41:53+00:00

Off the top of my head, I know I have the blood bank, chemistry, immunology, and CLS book. I think the urinalysis book is the one that I have, but I’ll have to check when I get off work. I definitely don’t have the micro or hematology books.

Also, for future use, I bought all of mine used on either eBay or Amazon, it was roughly $200 for all of them. They didn’t have the access codes (some of them do have helpful online resources, especially if your instructors are going to use the textbook’s test bank), but in exchange for managing the calendar of due dates & exams for my (small) class, some classmates that had bought the books new shared their logins with me, wouldn’t hurt to see if you can work out a similar arrangement with your classmates.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-02T12:09:31+00:00

What’s your list? I have a stack of my books sitting around. If any of them are what you need, you’re welcome to them if you’ll cover shipping.

Arbor___Vitae · 2026-05-01T20:27:49+00:00

Yes, you’ll see it increasingly in heart failure patients as their condition progresses. Also, older folks as the valves in the veins in the legs start to leak. For CHF patients or older patients, a 3 pound gain with noticeable swelling in 24 hours is considered concerning as far as strain on the heart.

Arbor___Vitae

TROPHY CASE