Week 4 Blog #2 (1/27/23)

What advice would you give to a junior in high school who wants to pursue a career in the field of your internship? My advice to anyone who plans on pursuing pathology is that there is much more to it than always working with specimen. There are various jobs that pathology has to offer, for example, if you didn’t want to work directly with the specimen you could train to become a lab assistant. Lab assistants mainly take care of the paper work as well as making slides. However, if you are interested in working with specimen you can work to become a grosser which works mainly with the specimen and partly handles paper work. The pathologist assistants also work directly with the specimen however since they have a higher education and have worked in pathology for longer, they also work with the pathologists themselves to make a decision on a diagnosis. Pathology is a lot more than just inspecting body parts so I would definitely suggest doing an internship with a pathology lab because you will always be surprised to see that it’s much more than that.

This is a liver that had a tumor. The red meaty looking part of it is what was healthy however, the white circle on the far left of it is the tumor.

A kidney was brought in, this kidney also had a tumor. the top orange-ish oval shapes are the tumor while the rest is kidney and fat.

This is an ovarian dermoid cyst. A dermoid cyst is made up of germ cells that eventually become egg and sperm cells. However, these cells don't form into a baby but they do grow parts of the body such as skin, hair, teeth, and sometimes tiny hand and feet.