It's exam season, so somewhere right now, an MLS student is probably trying to cram every organism, every biochemical test, every bottle colour, every reference range, every coagulation factor, and approximately 150 things that were mentioned just once in a lecture three months ago and honestly? That student would be on the right track.

Sometimes studying Medical Laboratory Science feels like a memory contest. Cram the causative organism, the right stain, the key principle, the chemical reaction and of course the reference ranges. 

Repeat. Revise. Forget. Revise again but eventually, the laboratory asks a very different question: What do you do when the result doesn't look like the one you memorised?

The laboratory is not built around perfect textbook examples. A patient doesn't always arrive as a neatly packaged case from a PowerPoint slide. A specimen can be haemolysed. A culture can produce an unexpected organism. A control can fail. Two consecutively run results may not agree.

A patient's clinical picture may not seem to match the numbers you are used to and then, you realise your memorisation isn't enough.

You have to think, observe, question, investigate, verify, interpret and then report.

That is the exact difference between knowing that EDTA is used for a full blood count and understanding why the specimen belongs in that tube.

The ability to see an abnormal result and ask: "Is this truly abnormal, or is there something about the specimen, method, or patient that I need to consider first?"

The facts we memorise matter, of course they do. I mean, you cannot reason your way through a laboratory procedure you don't understand but memorisation is the foundation, not the entire building.

Your notes tell you what is known while your training teaches you how to use what you know and the laboratory eventually teaches you something no AI generated MCQs can fully prepare you for and that is when the real scientist in you has to show up because knowing the answer is not the same as knowing what to do with it.

So, as you prepare for your upcoming exams, memorise what you need to memorise. Learn your principles. Know your organisms. Understand your procedures.

But don't just ask yourself:

"Can I remember this?"

Ask:

"Can I explain it?"

"Can I apply it?"

"Can I recognise when something doesn't make sense?"

Because while an examination may ask you for an answer, the laboratory will ask you to find one🔬