Key data
Job description: Biomedical scientist
Company: Sigmund Freud psychiatric hospital (LSF)
Place: Graz, Austria
I did my internship from 30 June to 25 July 2014.
My contact
What I did:
- Taking venous and capillary blood samples
- Receiving samples (vials of blood, urine and body fluids) and preparing them for analysis, if necessary, using centrifugation, allocating day numbers, placing the vials in the racks and placing the filled racks into the appropriate machines for analysis.
- Once the analysis process has been completed, the technical validation phase begins. If the values match previous values or the patient profile, the samples are released and the results are entered into the IT network for use by the relevant ward.
Why I enjoyed my internship:
- The first and best thing I can think of is ‘learning by doing’. Usually it happened as follows: Explanations –> Working under supervision –> Working independently. My colleagues were always happy to help if I had questions or if anything was unclear.
- Although this was my first internship and I had only completed one year of my course, I nevertheless had the feeling of being treated like a full member of the team.
- The chance to work outside of the lab, for example in the drug outpatient department.
What I learned:
- How to manage difficult patients
- How to handle stressful situations successfully
- A high sense of responsibility and accuracy are essential because we’re dealing with human lives here
My biggest success/My greatest experience
In the mornings, I was in the Psychiatry department from 7:15 where I took venous blood samples with a doctor. One day, he suggested that I take the blood samples on the male ward until he was ready with the patients. It went quite well and the doctor congratulated me and even gave me a little cuddly toy as a reward because I was so ‘proficient’.
How I secured the internship:
I secured my first internship via FH JOANNEUM. When it came to finding my second internship as part of a holiday job at the LKH Leoben hospital, my mother-in-law helped me because she works as a biomedical scientist at the hospital. There I worked in the bacteriology, cytology and histology labs.
What I want to do in the future:
Given that this was my first internship and it offered me the chance to learn about so many new and interesting things, I can imagine myself continuing to work in this profession. However, after completing my course, I would like to study for a part-time Master’s degree and then try for a position in quality assurance and quality control. This internship and those still to come help me to optimise my objectives.