I kinda touched base on some of this already. You can move into CT, you can move into mammography. Those two areas have extra courses that our national association does offer in order to become better educated in those areas to perform them. That doesn’t mean you can’t get a job without the courses, but they do recommend that you do take those courses while you’re learning and being employed by that area. You can also move into angiography, which is the area that I described that visualizes the blood vessels of the body. There’s always that move into management. When those ones that are there get old and they retire, then someone has to fill their shoes. Or I retire, I already have one guy at work though who’s told me a million times he wants my job. I told him he’s going to have to wait a long time yet. There are a lot of students who do go out of X-ray directly into sales. They’re selling the radiology equipment. Some of them are computer “techie” guys or girls or women, whatever and they definitely want to sell that type of equipment. So they’re big into that. Radiation safety. We have a section in our hospital that is radiation safety. They tell us how to be safe or make sure that we are being safe. MRI and Ultrasound are a different color because you do need to take an extra course or an extra program to actually get into those fields. Ultrasound is an 18-month program outside of X-ray and MRI is a 9-month program outside of X-radiation.
There’s also Nuclear Medicine and Radiation Therapy, which are also, fall under the ARRT, which are other modalities that you can take courses, and you don’t need X-ray to get into them. They’re completely separate. But radiology itself is recognized by the US Armed Forces. So you could actually go and work in the army or with the Armed Forces as an radiology technician. They need them out in the different war zones, so to speak. If they have injuries they do have X-ray equipment on site where they can actually image the soldiers. You could also go into quality testing industry. They do a lot of imaging of airplane engines to make sure that they are safe. I don’t know a lot about that, but I do know that they use X-ray to image the engines.
Qualities and abilities are needed for someone starting out. I kind of touched a little bit on what is expected of the person who’s coming into a job. Good communication skills, I always like to use the word empathy. That you have empathy for your patients, so you are always aware of how they’re feeling. Able to handle those stressful situations, critical thinking skills. In your present position, my position that I’m now, I know, me personally? I need patience. Because the students are coming to me from Red River College, they’ve learn everything out of the book but they are quick to find out that every patient who walks in the door is not a textbook patient. They might not be able to do exactly as the book as told them to do. So it’s my job to teach them how to think outside the box. So I need patience in my job so they learn how to work with patients.