(upbeat music) (gentle music) - My name's Alyssa Miller.

I work at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Hazleton, as a medical lab technician here in the lab.

The thing that led me to pursue a career as a lab technician would have to be I was very undecided when I was in high school as to what I wanted to do, what I wanted to go to school for.

I liked biology, I liked chemistry, I liked the sciences.

I thought about helping people, but I'm not really a people person to be like hands on in that sense.

And then I found out that you could be behind the scenes doing basically the detective work to finding out why somebody's sick, or what's causing an ailment, something like that, and that's kind of what led me to where I am now.

(gentle music continues) To me, I like the fact that I just get to help somebody.

Like my grandma, she was always sick with like congestive heart failure and stuff like that.

She was always in the hospital all the time.

That was also something that led me to this field too.

(gentle music continues) The educational path for this career would be going to school through either a two-year degree or a four-year degree.

I went with a two-year degree going to Penn State Hazleton.

And you get to do your clinicals, you go through basic chemistry, bio until you get to your second year and then you dive deep into the world of the laboratory.

(gentle music continues) So right now at the microscope, I'm looking at somebody's slide for a differential.

It tells us what the numbers are for your white cells in your blood, that lets doctors know where you're sick, like if it's a bacteria or a viral infection so they know what to treat you with.

A typical day in the lab is, it varies every single day.

You never have the same day repeated over and over.

It's always something new, whether it's dealing with machine technology that's running and analyzing the specimens to computers where you have to enter the results.

The departments I like the most, they'd have to be chemistry and blood bank because to me they're the more hands-on of the departments.

This machine here, it's for the coag tests, so it'll like help determine like what your clotting factor is, and like your bleeding time, and everything like that so that if you are like hurt with like a cut or something, if you take longer to get like a scab or something on it, the blood work will tell us like, "There's something wrong."

My favorite aspect of being a lab technician would have to be helping people without being there like in the front, dealing with everything.

I'm okay with being the behind the scenes kind of people that you don't really see or recognize that help take care of you.

(gentle music continues) One of my like greatest achievements so far I'd have to say is I just became the lead tech in chemistry and I really was pushing to be lead in there because it's one of my favorite departments and I like troubleshooting the machines.

That's like, I'm not scared to roll my sleeves up and just take something apart or try to fix it.

If you're curious, love solving puzzles, and wanna make a difference, this could be the perfect career for you, so hopefully- - All right, good.

- Cool.

This job has helped me achieve personal and financial goals by letting me build upon my hobbies.

I like to travel.

I'm able to go places.

It's fun to actually be able to have fun and do things that I couldn't see myself doing otherwise.

(gentle music continues) Okay, so this is something that we do over here.

This is the QC, when we run it in chem, when it comes over, we make sure that it's in the right parameters and everything.

When people come in and you see their age and you think to yourself like, "This could be my grandma or grandpa or somebody like that," when I do my job, I kind of like keep that in the back of my mind that it could be a family member and I want them to get the best care that they possibly could.

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