That’s a Wrap on Clinical Chemistry

Way back in August, we started our course in Clinical Chemistry by watching the solar eclipse from the roof of a parking ramp. It’s hard to believe, but now we’re only one week away from finishing this nine-week course. When compared to the other courses we’ve taken, chemistry stands out as being the most similar to a traditional college class. We had lectures almost every day, along with a lab once or twice a week. Unlike microbiology or hematology, where the focus was on lab work with lectures online each night to help prepare, our chemistry course focused on the lectures given in class.

We were lucky enough to listen to a variety of professionals speak on the many topics relevant to a clinical chemistry lab.

Hearing these experts’ talks gave us just a small introduction to what we can expect to see when we do our clinical rotations.

This course challenged each of us to pull knowledge from other classes we took in college, like anatomy and physiology, along with classes we’ve taken here, such as hematology. It gave us an opportunity to realize how broad the scope of the chemistry lab is and to test how much we could actually remember about the wide range of subjects. Our clinical chemistry course also challenged us to think on our feet and troubleshoot during labs. They weren’t focused on achieving perfectly accurate results, but rather working with the results we did get, determining what went wrong and how to fix the problem.

We learned how to interpret our results and apply them to patient samples.

While these last nine weeks were definitely a struggle at times with trying to put together the large amounts of information presented to us, we all learned a lot. We are all very prepared and very excited to start our clinical rotations in January, where we can put all of this knowledge into practice.

Elizabeth Gamache

Elizabeth Gamache is a student in Mayo’s Medical Laboratory Science class of 2018, and will also graduate from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse with a degree in Clinical Laboratory Science. She was born and raised in Wisconsin, but enjoys the adventure of living in a new state. When she’s not doing schoolwork, Elizabeth enjoys reading, hiking, finding local coffee shops, and exploring new places.