- This is Lab Medicine Rounds, a curated podcast
for physicians, laboratory professionals and students.
I'm your host, Justin Kreuter,
a transfusion medicine pathologist
and assistant professor of laboratory Medicine
and pathology at Mayo Clinic.
Today we're rounding with Mr.
Bob Jackson, an instructor in laboratory medicine pathology
here at Mayo Clinic to talk about the challenge
of being a lifelong learner.
Thanks for joining us today, Mr. Jackson.
- Oh, it's my pleasure. So cool to, to be invited on.
- Absolutely. So, so what the audience doesn't know is
that we work together quite,
quite well on the learner side of things.
And, and as somebody whose heart also goes pitter-patter
for education, I thought this would be a really fun way,
you know, as this is our holiday season episode, you know,
we're going to the new year
and everybody's getting kind of New Year's resolutions
and thinking about how to do things.
You know, this, this idea
of being a lifelong learner popped in my head.
And I, I wanted to kick off this conversation with you
by asking like, why, why is it important to be a,
a lifelong learner?
- Oh, so, you know, when I, when I think of
that question one, I'm like, maybe I was born into it.
My, one of my favorite stories that my mom tells,
I actually don't remember, is first day of kindergarten,
I come home from kindergarten
and my mom's like, Hey, what'd you learn today, buddy?
And I was just like, nothing. All we did was color.
And I just being disappointed with, I, I was prepared,
I guess, you know, good parenting, maybe she prepared me
for, you know, this great learning experience
that was gonna be kindergarten and all we did was color.
So shout out to mom,
but, you know, why is it important to be,
'cause things change, you know, medicine,
lab medicine, life changes.
That's, that's why you gotta be ready to learn and adapt.
Could be, you know, all sorts of things.
Like whether your career changes, you know, I've had
multiple careers over the course of my young life
and things have already changed.
I'm relatively new to transfusion medicine.
I started my career here at Mayo
some 15 years ago now in the clinical chemistry lab.
Our big core lab was the last place I wanted to work at,
or, or any lab.
I did not wanna do chemistry.
So where did I get a job at Mayo?
It was clinical chemistry, you know,
and I quickly discovered I really enjoyed training,
and so I kind of got more experience, tried to,
you know, volunteer whenever we had new employees
or students come through, or observers
or path residents, pathology residents, and just sit down
and, and like practice it.
And then when an education specialist position came up,
I jumped at that
and started teaching chemistry
and just That's awesome. I, yeah.
- I love how you're highlighting for our listeners, right?
I mean, the students that are listening can relate to this.
'cause you're, you're talking about how
to think about future proofing your career, as we all know,
you know, we might have one vision for how things go and,
and we get interested or different opportunities open up.
I think that laboratory professionals absolutely can
relate and understand how we might move through and,
and also where we might see our, our career ladders.
And then also clinicians could be relating to this
as well about thinking about how are they future proofing
as, as the clinical area changes.
You know, we talk about lifelong learning
and I think maybe sometimes for the student listeners,
maybe it sounds a little bit kind of cliche.
I think absolutely. For some of us, you know,
that have been in the game a while, it's like, oh no,
this is, this is quite important.
I'm curious, what do you see as the challenges
to lifelong learning that just, you know, kind of
are there making it a little bit difficult each day?
- Yeah, I mean, it, it could be uncomfortable.
Like you don't know stuff.
Like, and,
and kind of, if you wanna understand that you,
that you need to learn something.
If you think you know everything, you obviously don't,
but you have to get yourself out of
that Dunning Kruger effect loop and,
and understand that, you know, I don't know everything.
This is an opportunity to learn.
You know, our example that kind
of came up this week in our morning conference, you know,
we're, we're going through our patient lists and everything
and talking about how these patients are doing
and some different testing methodologies
because things are coming from different work units
and what that means.
And then, you know,
we're having the learners draw it on the board for us.
And I'm like, yeah, yeah.
And we're kind of adding in our 2 cents.
And we had it wrong.
And thankfully we had a polite
and learned colleague in our midst, shout out
to Corey Dulek.
And, and he was like, you know, you guys, like,
he gently approached us
and, you know, I think you guys have that wrong.
I think this is a common misconception.
And he righted us on it. It was beautiful.
And then to your credit, you latched onto it.
It was like, oh, we gotta learn this.
Like, what a, you know, what,
what parts of this are different?
I immediately, like right
after that meeting was up, ran to the lab that performs
that testing, you know, said, show me the instrument.
Show me what's going on here. I gotta know this.
Like, it was, it was a little gift to me yesterday
that I got to go run in there, talk
to the education specialist in the lab
that I knew was a subject matter expert.
And she explained it to me. She pointed it out.
I took some pictures, I ran back to the other people
that were in the room with us.
I was like, guys, this is how it works.
I may have downloaded like the package insert
and the FDA 5 0 1 clearance for the, for the instrument
to like, wait, how does it shake the plate?
And all sort. Yeah. It was a great,
- I think our audience can understand
and appreciate why I asked you to come
and record this podcast.
Right? Because, 'cause one of the things I want to kind
of bring out into the open, right, you,
you brought up the idea of the challenge can be,
it can be uncomfortable.
- Absolutely. - And, and certainly I think a lot
of listeners can be like, wow, if I was in a, you know,
a diverse meeting and talking about something
and somebody, you know, said
that actually I was completely wrong.
And in that case, right,
I was talking about something in completely the opposite of
how, what the truth was.
Yeah. You know, me too.
That might make people, you know, turn red in the face,
feel very embarrassed.
But like you're saying, you, you like grabbed onto that
and took it to a wonderful place, right?
Like, what's that magic trick that you do of like,
it's not about you getting embarrassed.
It's about, oh, here's a gap
and I'm gonna, I'm gonna run with this.
'cause it feels like that's part of the skills somehow
for a lifelong learner
because I think gaps come up for many of us,
and sometimes it might be like,
and I don't know if it comes from education where, you know,
you're getting evaluated
and you're like, oh, I don't want them to see that gap.
Can you elaborate on like kind of how you, how you take
that in a positive light as opposed to a common challenge
of, of being very embarrassed?
- Hmm. I mean there were, there's a bit of embarrassment
that's always gonna be there.
You know, I, I really think it, it may be something I'm born
with, but, you know, nature versus nurture kind of always
leading on itself.
I, I think I, I have really have always loved curiosity
and love science and exploration,
and I, like, I try to, to instill that in my child,
ask questions, you know, I'm,
I'm gonna learn something every day
whether I want to or not.
You might as well enjoy it.
You know, it's, it's definitely, I think interacting
with people too really helps, you know, it's, it's fun
for me to go talk to somebody and learn something
- That actually sparks a thought in my mind in that.
Yeah. As I kind of think, I think most of my kind of times
where I've realized that I have a gap, it's been when I'm
with people versus, I don't know, maybe I have a, maybe
that's being human in that when I'm
by myself working on something,
I'm not really catching my assumptions that I'm making
as well as, you know, when I'm interacting with colleagues.
- Absolutely. Nobody's there to challenge you or,
or even kind of reflect on the idea
and say like, well, couldn't it be this way?
I know you said it this way, but is it always that way?
Well, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe maybe there are some exceptions to these rules.
I do like to embrace the gray area.
I really shy away from teaching anything as a dichotomy.
And so, you know,
whenever I teach, it's probably frustrating to some learners
that, like, I'm, I, I say, Hey,
this is the way it is almost all the time.
It's always X or Y, but guess what Z is out there
and maybe, maybe we know about Z and it's just really rare.
Or maybe we don't know anything about Z
and there's QRS and they're way out there
and they're not even in our brains yet.
And in five years, we'll, somebody will discover that
and we'll be like, oh wow, paradigm shifts.
Let's think about new stuff.
- I'm glad you brought up that example,
because I think, again, for our listeners in, in medicine,
like you bring up it, it is a lot of shades of gray.
There's been articles written about the skill
of working with uncertainty
and just how that is a, a something
that is generally woven into the fabric of healthcare.
Can you, and, and as somebody
who knows your scores from your learners
are very high.
I think it's fair to say, you know,
you almost have a following of, of students that have come
through and worked with you, Bob, like, can you kind
of share, like, how do you talk about that gray?
Because like you say, learners who are just,
just first learning these concepts, whether it's
immunohematology, clinical chemistry, right?
Like when somebody's just getting their arms around it,
it seems like, you know, that's the goal is,
and I think a lot of us maybe listening to this podcast,
myself included in some ways, like, we realize the gray, but
because we're dealing with a learner, we might be like,
okay, you know, XY, black, white,
but it, how do you introduce the gray?
- That is a very good one.
It, I really, I,
I put it right there at the front, which is, which is,
you know, definitely I think probably is frustrating
to some learners.
They're like, Bob, I don't want
to know about the extraneous weird stuff or whatever.
You know, there's a lot of, most and probably and often
and only occasionally
and rares that come into my voice or into my speaking.
I'm, I, I always avoid never
and never say always.
And so I, I really do try
to present things though as, you know, dichotomous or,
or in good buckets of like known
and these are the things you need to know,
and hey, we're gonna ask you this on an exam,
or you're gonna see this scenario hop pop out in real
life, so be ready to,
to think about these different things that you need to do.
But, you know, sometimes there's gonna be a weird one
where it's not X or Y, it's Z
and you had to be thinking about it.
And so just always, you know, come back to the fact
that Z's are out there, they're they're gonna come by.
- One of the things that I struggle with specifically with
that, and, and you know, maybe this is, you know,
our plight in in pathology,
sometimes I get,
I don't know if it's the right way to say it, is
too curious about the learner's question
about the exception to the rule.
And I have, you know, on occasion been known to
go out in in left field with them, you know,
maybe more so than is really helpful for somebody
that's learning the, the how, how do you,
how do you catch yourself, you know,
before like totally nerding out
or how do you do that kind of bringing somebody back
to be like, yeah, it's, it's very interesting,
but you know what you really need to focus on right now.
- Hmm. I'm definitely
guilty of the same sin of, Hey, let's go down
that rabbit hole and chase it until,
until we find another world. And
- I only ask because I, I'm really working on this in myself
as kind of catching and,
and realizing, you know, it's like we wanna introduce
that shade of gray,
but you know, we also can't get
distracted. That's not the big
- Show.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So, you know, what's coming up in my brain is,
is clinical chemistry stuff.
It's where I've spent most of my adult life
and it's probably like weird
interferences with different tests.
Those are always really cool
and like a clinical story
that will always capture somebody's imagination.
And so, you know, that I, I bring those up a lot,
but then I do have to be careful about like, well, you know,
all these things can interfere with this assay
and that's why we got this crazy result on this patient
and they were misdiagnosed or treated inappropriately.
There are all these other things
and let's find all the compounds that also behave
that same way.
Well, you know, maybe let's tamp it down,
just kind of look at, you know, the things
that cause the most common interferences
and, you know, just store that one weird one
back in your mind.
Save that picture from your cell phone of
that weird colored sample
and put it on your, on your computer to talk about
as a fun story.
But, you know, you don't have to talk about
all the crazy interferences,
but it's, it's definitely a, a very tough challenge for me
to, to pair back all those rabbit holes.
- Right. I think it's, maybe there's a little bit
of an honesty in this conversation
about like being a lifelong learner.
There's some of these things like curiosity as kind
of probably a, a, a skill
that we can cultivate
and you know, to some extent if we go to an extreme with it,
it can get in the way of other things.
So maybe there's a bit of an honesty of moderation
that comes out or that I'm hearing in this conversation.
What do you think is, we got our, our listeners here
and you know, students, clinicians,
laboratory professionals.
What are your thoughts on how we can help
or coach learners to become lifelong learners?
And, you know, maybe that's a little bit, you know,
for ourselves as we're going into the new year, I'm looking
for, you know, and how can we kind
of spark these thoughts in our, in our listeners?
How do you kind of help learners become lifelong learners?
- Yeah, so I think definitely at the very beginning of,
of connecting with this person and,
and learning with them is let them know
that you're learning too.
You know, they're, they're learning,
but I'm also learning while I'm teaching
and, you know, all these, these little things
that once I've taught it, it like sticks with me
and have them teach you something.
So one of the, the fun things that I do,
or I think it's fun is like I get learners from all
over the country and all over the world.
And so, like, oftentimes, so my current pathology resident
that I'm training in, she is from Turkey,
and my next door neighbors in
here are also Turkish.
And so I've always dabbled, like in Turkish language,
I have my little Duolingo app on my phone
and play with Turkish.
And I'd actually set it down a long time ago,
but when I got this path resident, I picked it back up
and I was like, oh, this is another opportunity
to practice Turkish.
And so I'm like, Hey, you know, Dr.
Ozcan, show me some, some Turkish here, you know,
how would you use this phrase?
And she's, you know, she gets these little opportunities
to connect her culture, but,
and she gets to teach me things.
I, you know, it's easy enough with learners too to like,
you know, what are your interests?
And you know, I'm teaching you this transfusion medicine
stuff, but you know, oh, that, that kind
of anatomic pathology is really interesting to you.
Show me something about it
and just let them know that like,
we're all in this together.
We're all learning.
Having the safe space that,
like in our morning conference
that I think you're very skilled at, at keeping
that environment safe
and allowing everybody to ask questions
and even, you know, even if they're a dumb question,
allowing them to, to ask those and let's go explore those.
Like we don't, we, we have
to do some work in morning conference,
but also we can push it aside.
We could get that done, you know, after lunch
and let's go explore this new avenue
of curiosity, let 'em do that.
- Oh yeah. Have you,
I'm thinking about when we've kind of over
or run into struggles where somebody is maybe I think about,
and to be fair, I'm probably overgeneralizing,
but if you were to have a learner who is just like
about getting the work done right,
and, you know, they're just, they're really good at
that, right?
I can think about learners like that where they're,
they're phenomenal about getting the work done,
but sometimes I can be worried about like, are they
really kind of practicing
and developing this skill of lifelong learning
because I see them, they're just boom, boom, boom.
How do you kind of approach that? Hmm.
How do you help that person kind of see that, hey, you know,
there's value in maybe taking more time in
particular areas.
- Yeah. - Have you come across that?
- I have come across that,
and I'm trying to, you know, with,
with our kind of career where we are, a lot
of times we're preparing people for board exams
and so Yeah.
Yeah, I know you're not gonna be a,
a transfusion medicine doc
or Yeah, yeah, I know medical lab students,
you're not gonna work in the transfusion lab,
but hey, this is gonna be on your boards.
It's an easy cop out solution.
Like, you know, that's why we're teaching this.
We want you to really succeed at
these sort of things.
Let them know that, you know, life does change.
You, you may not work in a transfusion medicine lab right
after you graduate
and you may work in a microbiology lab for five or 10 years,
but then the opportunity comes where, oh yeah, now you're,
you're gonna have to change your, your positioning
to no transfusion medicine, be able to practice it.
So kind of, you know, it doesn't work just only like
with lab or clinical practice
or, you know, your specialty in pathology.
It's life. You know, I'm from Alabama,
grew up there.
I, you know, thought I was gonna be a, a roadie for,
for a band for
after high school that fell through.
And so I found myself working construction
in Alabama in the summer and was like, I need an education.
This is, this is not okay.
And then, you know, from there,
there are just all these different little changes
and shifts to like, well,
I thought I was gonna do computer science in school.
And so I did that for a while
and then, oh no, you know, I fell back in love with biology
and, and science kind of traditional science.
And so thought I was gonna go that way.
My wife needed to change careers
and jobs, so no had to change schools.
And then I just kind of found myself in lab science.
So let let learners know that things change.
You know, you, you're gonna, you're gonna have
to adapt whether you want to or not, so enjoy it. Love
- It.
I hear two things in your answer.
One part is kind of highlighting is, you know,
if somebody is not kind of taking the opportunity
of what's coming across the workload, kind
of highlighting why, what is the relevance,
why is this important?
You have to connect that for them.
And I also hear you really kind of connecting us to the top
of this podcast again, about the, the why
this skill is important for this lifelong learning
of we're not sure how our careers are going to progress.
And honestly, maybe one of the fun things in life,
it are those unexpected changes that,
that bring all of us together.
- Absolutely. - All right,
I'm gonna put you on the spot here to, to close out.
Bob, do you have New Year's resolutions?
You're, you're thinking about in your mind?
- I'm, I'm not a big New Year's resolution kind of guy.
Okay. I'm always, I'm always evolving. Right on.
Alright. I'm always changing.
- Maybe could you like, you know,
I was hearing about people not having New Year's
resolutions, but have quarterly quests.
Oh yeah. What are you, what are you kind kind of kick off
for the, for the new year.
What are you looking forward to in 2025?
- You know, there's a big project
that's been hanging over my head that
for the last like three years
that if I do not get done within the first quarter,
I just 2025, I'm, I'm gonna, I don't know,
I'll just have to like quit my job
and go work at a gas station or something.
Like I just gotta do it.
So yeah, I'm buckling down after,
after Christmas, then I'm buckling down
and that project has gotta do it.
- Well, I'm bringing you back for
that podcast conversation in the future.
That's another interesting challenge is
how can we work on long-term projects
- Nice.
- When there's so many short-term things
that come up in life.
Absolutely. We've been rounding with Mr.
Bob Jackson discussing the critical skill
of lifelong learning.
Thanks for taking the time with us today, Bob.
- Absolutely. It's my pleasure.
- And to all of our listeners,
thank you for joining us today.
We invite you to share your thoughts
and suggestions by email to MCL education@mayo.edu.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe
and until our next rounds together, we encourage you
to continue to connect lab medicine
and the clinical practice through educational conversations.