I haven’t been totally paralyzed by my current life. I’m still trying to think about my future career-wise. Especially since I’m in my late 40s.
As I’ve mentioned previously I’m currently working as the shop janitor at a large car dealership. While the job is a good one, it takes a toll on my body. I have a large cart that holds 8 trash cans or 12-15 tires and can make 3-5 trips with it a day. And there’s 10 mop buckets that can need changed out every day.
And there’s also the fact that my schooling was meant to make me a research scientist. 2 bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree and this is what I’m doing? It burns sometimes though I try to avoid letting that eat at me. But what to do?
Lately I’ve settled on something in medical technologist work. It wouldn’t take more than a year or 2 of classes and the pay would be good. At first I thought nuclear medicine technologist since I’ve had experience with radioactive materials, but these degrees don’t tend to be online and Phoenix, AZ is the closest place with one, I want to stay in Tucson. So that brings me to radiology technologist. Not as high paying but 65k a year is still nice. A local community college offers that degree in 2 years.
Next is money. I’ve been able to save and I should be able to put enough away to cover the cost of the degree. Here is where it gets a bit more complicated. I doubt my current job will be compatible with the class schedule. I can find another job with more compatible hours, or take out a loan to live off of for 2 years or a combination of the 2. It would be nice to only worry about studying, but it would also be nice to not pay back a loan (I have no student debt otherwise).
I hear there are grants and such to help but have never been good at finding them. Maybe I’ll do better there this time. I also hear that if I work for a medical institution they help with school but I’m not sure what I can do there. Would I look like an equivalent to out of highschool on paper? Or would my education and experience count for something? Maybe they want a radiology technologist so help me with the idea that I come work for them? I think I have some optimism back. I’m paranoid about how my age factors into this though.
Nothing to do but make sure I meet the program requirements and take a couple of classes for now, the program starts twice a year and they only take 8 at a time. Not to mention getting in contact with their advisors and seeing what they think about the education I already have.
Well, that’s what’s new with me.
I’m retired, but before I started my last job in my mid-40s and I was kinda worried I’d be seen as too old and overqualified, turns out they appreciated my maturity and work history. Those are advantages younger people tend to lack.
Remember too that if you’ve been in employment, clearly you are employable.
Good luck!
Hi. I recently trained as a radiology technologist (I started on this career path the year I turned 39 years old, and graduated at 42, just a couple years ago), and although my schooling was in Canada (and there may be some differences), I would expect both the nature of the educational experience, and the job itself, to be relatively similar. And I have thoughts. MANY thoughts. I will divide them up into one comment with thoughts on the job, and one comment with thoughts on the educational process. Apologies in advance for the EXTREMELY long posts, but I think my perspective here will help you decide what to do, so I won’t hold back.
Firstly, the job. This is a great job. I LOVE it. And at least in a mid-sized Canadian city, with an aging population and high demand for medical services, the job prospects seem pretty decent. I haven’t had any luck getting a hospital position thus far, but every clinic job I’ve applied for I’ve gotten, sometimes without a formal interview (I currently have four jobs). Plus, the situation seems pretty stable for the future, as there will be a need for people like me for a long time (before I started my program, I was worried that AI robots would quickly take over the profession, but now that I understand what the job actually IS…yeah, that’s decades away from happening, if it happens at all. So this is definitely a field where you will have a job for as long as you want one.
That leads me to my first point – three of my four jobs are casual jobs. The meaning of casual changes depending on the specific medical profession, but the term is pretty nebulous in MRT. Some casual employees just fill in for vacationing techs, while some have a regular schedule that doesn’t change week-to-week (two of my casual positions started out as vacation relief, and morphed into a more regular thing). But the one thing they all have in common is that they offer no benefits or any actual stability (nor do they allow you to gain seniority, if you are in an institution where that matters). I recently landed a part-time job that has more stability now (it’s 3 days a week, every week), but it has no benefits either…this is the next step up. Basically, it can take some time to get into a permanent job, and even if you do, it may not be full-time. Still, the pay is decent, and hopefully you enjoy the work…and it’s actually kind of nice to keep the ol’ brain box active by having to learn and switch between a few different clinics, all of which involve different computer systems, slightly different (but overlapping) responsibilities, and a different breakdown of the kind (and frequencies of each kind) of x-rays you’re doing. For example, my 3-day-a-week job now is 95% knee and hip x-rays, because I work mainly for a doctor who almost exclusively does knee and hip replacements, while one of the casual jobs has a wide array of sports medicine doctors at that clinic, so I get a huge variety, and another has a ton of respiratory specialists, so I do SO many chest x-rays. I have full time hours now (between all the jobs), and am hopeful that I will land an actual, full-time, permanent clinic job soon (with benefits).
Secondly, there are ways to change things up if you want to, to get into a different but related field that requires x-ray as a starting point. Here at least, getting a CT qualification involves getting hired as a CT tech first, and then you work as a tech while you complete three courses (you have three years to do these courses, and they’re self-study). This is necessary because the coursework requires practical experience. X-ray schooling gave me a few weeks of CT training, so I know how to do some of the basics (and some hospitals require x-ray techs to do certain types of CTs on night shifts), but they don’t let you do anything involving an IV infusion (which is a lot of CT – they let x-ray students do the computer stuff on infused studies, but you have to stay away from the actual IV power-injector). They include this in the x-ray program because they want A LOT (ideally, 40%) of x-ray techs to become CT techs IMMEDIATELY after graduating (as there’s a huge need – CT is the new x-ray…they’re being ordered more and more every year), so they want to give you a good idea of what working in CT is like. You can also upgrade to an MRI tech (which generally involves actual classroom schooling, usually a year or so), or you can specialize in interventional radiology (such as working in a cath lab, running the radiography equipment as cardiologists place stents into blocked arteries of people who are having heart attacks – this is generally on-the-job training, no formal schooling required). Those are the three main ways people specialize. Oh, there’s mammography too, which I always forget about because it’s not so easy for a man to find employment there (not that there’s rules against it, but most women want another woman doing their mammography, and I guess I understand that…although I don’t know why doctors and nurses are generally free to perform intimate medical procedures on patients of all genders, but somehow technologists are a step too far for some). I don’t know a lot about it, but I’m pretty sure it’s mostly on-the-job training. There might be a short course though.
And finally, x-ray specifically (not so much the other sub-specialties) is a lot more physical job that I anticipated. In clinics, there’s a lot of walking back and forth between a control console/computer (behind a shielded wall) and the patient to position them after each x-ray. There is bending, and there is some minor lifting. Fully lifting non-ambulatory patients is generally a hospital thing, and requires 2 or 3 techs to do safely, but even with the hydraulics, x-ray tubes are heavy and they take some effort to move around. A colleague of one of my bosses has been on disability for about 18 months because she got a frozen shoulder from moving that tube around for 20 years (it was this disability that turned my first casual position from a “covering vacation” type to a “regular hours” type, although it has since reverted because they hired someone else as a permanent replacement for the person on disability). And in the hospitals, it’s even MORE physical. Some days, you are walking around pushing a portable x-ray machine to image patients who can’t be safely transported to the x-ray suite (modern machines have a motor, so it’s not that much work, but you’ll easily put in 15,000 steps a day at work when you’re on portable duty). Hospitals require operating room work too, which is super fun (it was my favourite as a student…watching an orthopedic surgeon fix a broken bone never gets old), but which often involves standing for an hour or more at a time, taking images for a surgeon every few minutes, and wearing a 30-40 pound lead apron on top of it all. I was able to get a stool assigned to me whenever I was in the OR, because I do have an actual chronic injury that makes this kind of work harder, but even still, it can be difficult. Sometimes the surgeons just need you there for the beginning and the end of a surgery – they’ll call you in, you do your job and leave, and they call you back when they need you – but other times you need to be there for 3 or 4 hours with maybe a coffee break in there somewhere (another tech will spell you when you’re on break). And hospital floors are all concrete, with some linoleum or whatever on top, and that can take a toll on your back. Point is, even in clinics, I still come home with sore muscles sometimes, and the hospital is worse.
Okay, that’s the job. Next comment – the educational experience.
Okay, now the educational experience. This is more relevant to your current situation, considering whether you want to commit to learning this new set of skills, so I won’t hold back.
Firstly, x-ray school is hard (WAY harder than I thought it would be). I started out in a similar boat to you, educationally-speaking. Before I started x-ray, I had completed A LOT of post-secondary schooling, including a Bachelor of Science, an aborted Master’s degree (academia wasn’t for me, but I did a lot of research and coursework in the process of figuring that out), and nearly 2 years of a Bachelor of Education, wherein I discovered a fierce hatred for teaching children (teaching adults was awesome – I taught three different introductory university courses in my Masters program – but teaching kids is an entirely separate skill, requiring a very particular personality type, and I didn’t have it). X-ray was harder than anything I’d done before (more because of the actual volume of information you need to learn than the actual difficulty of the subject matter, although a lot of it WAS pretty difficult). The course breaks down into a didactic portion (in the classroom), and a practicum portion (in the hospital) – here, it’s a year of each.
I’ll start with the classroom stuff. I don’t know what your science background is, but I had taken university-level anatomy and physiology before, and yet comparing that to x-ray anatomy and pathology is like comparing the times tables to integral calculus. Every bodily system, from respiratory to digestive to skeletal, comes with a couple dozen pathologies you need to know, and know well (because they relate to the job of an x-ray tech). This includes everything from the demographics of who’s affected, the cause(s), symptoms and disease progression, all of the ways you can identify it on x-ray (and/or CT, because sectional anatomy is part of our competency profile), and how it is treated/cured. There are well over 200 pathologies in the Canadian competency requirements for x-ray techs. And the anatomy is more than twice as information-dense as the basic, 2nd-year anatomy you’d learn in university A+P (also, the aforementioned sectional anatomy might be the most difficult course I’ve ever taken…and I studied organic chemistry). Plus there is a decent amount of physics (nothing too crazy – that was the easiest stuff for me), and courses that break down all of the relevant equipment – x-ray, fluoroscopy, mammography and CT scanner – and how all of the parts of these machines function (all use x-rays, but are different in most other ways). The patient care courses are fairly easy overall, but extremely important (and the national exam in Canada reflects this importance in the weighting of questions). They do include a whole host of (sometimes disparate) information, such as a massive list of medications you need to know (including what they’re used for and what they do, in general terms), a lot of procedural stuff (from sterile field technique to properly performing a barium enema), and information on legal issues (where they intersect with the profession…for example, you need to know that taking an x-ray on a conscious patient who withholds their consent is considered to be the criminal offense of battery, for which you can be prosecuted). And there’s also classes on radiation biology and radiation protection, so you learn about all the ways radiation impacts our biology, and how we safeguard ourselves, patients, other medical personnel and members of the public.
And after all of that, you still have to learn how to actually take x-rays! I’d estimate that there are roughly 40 to 50 major x-ray protocols, plus another 30 minor protocols usually done in conjunction with a major one, and then some variations of major protocols for use in specific situations. Most of the major protocols have 2 or 3 specific x-rays that must be taken (some have 4 or 5), and the minor protocols sometimes have more than one as well. So I’d estimate there are ~150 different unique types of x-rays you need to know how to take, both in terms of how to position the patient, and how to direct the x-ray tube (projection). And both position and projection can be deliberately varied by the knowledgeable tech, depending on the state, and capabilities of the patient (e.g. are they conscious?; are they a trauma case from the ER with obvious major fractures?; if they’re really old, can they lie on their back without hurting themselves?), and the needs of their physician. Anyway…it’s a lot. And the technique interacts directly with your anatomical knowledge, so integrating these two knowledge bases is critical.
That’s a rundown of the didactic year (in general terms). It was a LOT. But it was also really interesting, and fun at times. Some students who were not academically-inclined had some issues, but I think only 2 people of the 37 who started out in my class failed the first year. But that was a reflection of the quality of the students (more on that later), not the difficulty of the task.
Then…there is the practicum year. This is where it gets even more challenging…at least for me it did. Practicum is a full-time job (unpaid, of course) where everybody is judging you constantly in order to protect the integrity of the profession. Nobody gives you the benefit of the doubt, in other words, and maybe they shouldn’t – when lives are on the line, I can understand being very conservative about upholding your standards. But that also functions as a barrier to people who don’t conform to the expectations of the techs at a practicum site, making it difficult for people who are neurodivergent (like me) to succeed in this environment.
My main mistake when going into my practicum year was that I treated it like I treated university – an educational experience. I was there to learn. But the x-ray techs you are learning from are there to…work. Some like teaching, some don’t, but what most techs DON’T like is a student who is always wondering why the tech is doing something in a certain way (especially when that way directly conflicts, or appears to conflict with the actual textbook). Every tech does things a bit differently, and in my naïveté, I wanted to figure out the pros and cons of each, and the requisite situational factors that determine how you adapt your technique, so I could do the same. And so I asked them. To me, there is the knowledge base, and the people applying it, and so I figured that they all were generally familiar with the state of the scholarship on the radiographic profession. But most of them, I since learned, do things the way they do them because…it’s the way they do them. They don’t have deep feelings about why. The good ones are responsive to situation, and will make subtle changes to improve their images whenever necessary, but they cannot usually articulate the reasons why they’re making those adjustments. It’s ingrained, and they haven’t thought about why in years, maybe decades. And the not-so-good ones (basically half of them) do things exactly the way they were taught, never really adapt to the needs of the situation more than the bare minimum, and when you (who are trying to be the best you can) wonder why not, they get defensive and start to say that you’re “not a team player” and that you “think you know more than the people who actually are doing this job.” From asking around, this kind of environment is not unique to x-ray education – pretty much every medical field has something like this going on, to a greater or lesser extent. I’ve heard nursing is particularly bad. And it is this way, to some extent, everywhere (at least in North America, based on my interactions with techs who trained all over Canada and the USA; I don’t know anyone who trained in Europe or Asia or somewhere else). HOWEVER, the culture of a hospital department has a lot to do with how bad it is. I had one excellent practicum experience, one pretty good one, one mediocre one, and one abysmal one. Leadership sets the tone for everyone, and some places have better leadership than others. So you can get lucky, I guess.
What I SHOULD have treated the experience as, was like the cliquiest high-school in the world. You want to fit in. You don’t ask a lot of questions. You figure things out on your own (and via careful probing of the techs who like teaching, who actually do have an introspective, curious personality, and who understand you’re just trying to learn as best as you can). And you accept that what you do in any given situation will depend on who you’re working with. Of course, hospital x-ray departments can contain dozens of people (the biggest site where I live had almost 50 techs on staff), and so it’s hard to remember that one person showed you X way of doing something two weeks later when you’re working with them the next time and are expected to do it X way (especially when you’ve learned 3 other ways in the interim, a couple of which worked out way better for you). It is an experience that is greatly facilitated by a high degree of social intelligence, and that is very much NOT my forté (to say the least). I can barely tell one short, skinny, white brunette with a ponytail from another (I don’t have full-blown face-blindness, but I still have trouble in this area and reliably confuse similar-looking people…at least for a few weeks, until I get to know everybody better). It also favours people who can reliably learn by WATCHING someone do something. Me, I learn by doing (over and over again – repetition helps a lot), and by speaking…talking things out as I complete a task.
Anyway, because of my misapprehensions of what the expectations of techs and instructors were (and associated chaotic learning process), I failed one practicum term. To be completely fair, I legitimately was not quite at the level of my peers at that time, so I understand why they failed me. But the reasons why I was not at their level were generally beyond my control, and so I was still pissed (and almost nobody made any effort to adapt their teaching to my personality, not even most of the clinical instructors, people who could clearly see that what they were doing was not working, but who expected me to just…figure it out). And there were other issues they had with me that were a product of me not fitting into their narrow idea of what a tech should be, but I won’t relitigate the past here. Anyway, a peculiarity of the educational system where I live is that they have one intake of students per year, and so if you fail anything, you often have to wait, for up to a YEAR (for me it was a year) to re-take that particular term (joining the students who are in next year’s class, if – and only if – they have room for you), and continue on from there. In this year off school, I deliberately stayed unemployed (I lived with my parents, and they supported me getting through this program no matter what, so it worked out fine). Instead of working, I studied every day, and also audited one of the first-year labs I’d already passed, so that I could get back into an x-ray suite and keep my skills up. I admit there was a lot of “sunk cost fallacy” going on at this point, especially because I wasn’t sure that I would be able to pass when I did start again. But I did see a future where I could be a tech, and I did like the job (just not some of the people doing it). And it paid off, because I passed the next time around.
One more thing: while I do think it would be possible for someone with good time management skills to maintain a part-time job during the theory part of the program (especially if there’s a lot of online learning still – some programs haven’t gone fully back to classroom instruction, and don’t plan to, having figured out that online is easier and cheaper), I would not recommend it for the practicum portion. That’s not to say that people didn’t have jobs during their practicum year. But they got very little sleep, their grades suffered, and they got burned out very quickly. It’s not a recipe for maintaining your mental health (which, in my case, was already quite poor, and I didn’t even have a job). HOWEVER, if you can find a job that doesn’t require a lot of stuff beyond showing up (like an evening shift sitting at a hotel desk, answering phones and maybe helping the odd guest out, once in awhile), I could see that working out. A couple people who had jobs did manage to keep their grades from dropping, and it was because they had jobs like this (so they could study a fair amount at work). They were still sleep deprived, and pretty burnt out though.
Anyway…I hope that was helpful. Like I said, I do love my job. I’m VERY glad I chose to persevere rather than giving up and trying something else. It feels good that something I devoted so much effort to is actually bearing fruit in the best way possible. It was initially a bit weird to be in the same class as many students who weren’t even born when I graduated high school, but I got used to it pretty quickly (also a tad weird being a man in a program wherein >80% of the students were women – like I said, my school accepted 37 students a year, and I was 1 of just 5 men in the first class, and 1 of 6 in the second – after I failed and re-entered the program). Moreover, as I alluded to above, the program was filled with overachievers of the highest degree, which took a bit of getting used to as I was used to being near the top of most of the classes I’ve taken (and here, I was quite average in the first year, and well below average for most of the practicum portion). And most students struggled with the general difficulty – people who are used to getting scores >90% in their prior studies balk when they try their hardest and still only manage a 72% (in the practicum year, 70% was a pass, and yet the class average on EVERY test and exam was below 75%, while just two individuals EVER attained a test score higher than 87%). My highest mark on any exam in that practicum year was 80%. The college claimed this was done deliberately so that we would be more prepared for the national exam, which was usually quite a bit easier than the college examinations. And indeed, not one person in my class failed the national.
If you have any questions, please ask and I’ll try to answer them. I hope you found this helpful, and good luck, however you choose to proceed.
Thanks John, that makes me feel better.
I’m grateful for the extended comments VolcanoMan. I’ll consider them carefully.
Thank you, VolcanoMan, for the lengthy comments. I’ll give them careful thought.