The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown everyone off their usual routines this year. Yet, ASCP’s Pathology and Career Ambassadors have not missed a beat in taking their presentations virtual.
Ambassador Kristen Pasavento, MA, MLS(ASCP)CM, who teaches in the medical laboratory science program at Loyola University Chicago, has given online presentations long before the pandemic. “As I transitioned my students to online learning, I also transitioned my Career Ambassador presentations to online,” she said.
Ms. Pasavento shares her love of the laboratory medicine profession with everyone from Girl Scout troops to college students. “When I transitioned online, I still started with 20-minute presentations and would let the teachers (and in some cases, parents) know in advance what materials to have on hand so they could participate in simple science experiments along with me,” she explained.
She even expanded her career awareness presentations to include children of parents in her social circle, noting many parents lamented that their children were not able to do hands-on classroom sciences experiments while learning from home.
“For children from ages five to eight, I would give one talk and one experiment. For students ages nine to twelve, I would do a more intricate experiment. And for high school students, we would do DNA extractions. Sometimes we extracted DNA from strawberries or the students would do their own DNA from their cheek cells. Everyone loved it. It got students excited about learning again,” she said.
Meanwhile, ASCP Pathology Ambassador Savanah Gisriel, MD, a second-year resident in anatomic and clinical pathology at Yale University School of Medicine, mostly talks to medical students about careers in pathology. “I reached out to the advisor of Yale School of Medicine’s Pathology Interest Group,” she explained, adding, “We set up a zoom meeting and 50 people attended! Before the pandemic, they had done tours through the pathology department. We plan to do this on a semi-annual basis.”
Apart from her outreach to the Yale Pathology Interest Group, she has also organized a Zoom resident panel over Twitter that was successful. She plans to conduct the Twitter panel twice a year.
Dr. Gisriel is dedicated to spreading the word about pathology among medical students because many medical schools, including her own in Arizona, have cut down significantly on the amount of time they spend introducing students to pathology.
“I don’t understand the reason. Pathology is a hidden gem,” she said. “In pathology, you get to look at so many different organ systems, so there is a wide spectrum of things you see each day. You are making the definitive diagnosis and what you put in your report has so many implications for how that person will be managed and surveilled over time.”
For information about Career Ambassadors and Pathology Ambassadors, click
here.
