Oakton Community College

Date: May 16 2012
Major: PreMed and Medical (This Major's Salary over time)
Oakton Community College is set upon a beautiful backdrop of prairie restoration and forest, with a gorgeous campus resplendent in modern art made by the students of the school. The halls are clean, hung with gorgeous art, and makes you feel like it is more of a student union off of a major university (I went to WIU before this school).

I enrolled in the MLT program to get into the medical field. As you can see, I was less then charitable with my review.

Allow me to be clear: 3/4ths of the actual MLT teachers are fantastic. Real professionals who spent real time in the labs, doing real work. One of them actually took time off from her personal married life to come teach us blood banking three days a week at strange hours of the day. Dedication does not begin to describe the kind women who chose to teach our class. They had a strong sense of humor, could take a joke, and made learning the material fun and worthwhile.

The funding for the program is appropriate (though they will never have the money to get automated cell counters or other high tech machinery that cost tens of thousands of dollars), and the equipment appropriate for education purposes. It is by no means up to date with the modern standard, but this should not be a surprise to anyone.

Then one may wonder

why the tepid review?

No matter how good your teachers are, if the administration in charge of the program is bad, your superb education will be tanked when the head of a program meddles in the students affairs.

The Head of the Program had far too much control over the curriculum, and decided to interfere with the personal lives of the students as well. I will not go into details, but she made the life of a fellow student a constant living hell, to the point where that student nearly quit the program.

She also decided to take control of one of the most important and difficult classes in the curriculum, Medical Microbiology. In every class, the average grade for the top students capped around a low A to high B. The moment that she took control, the grades dropped to when only a single student was passing. In order for this situation to not attract attention, she had to fudge the results of the class in order to not flunk out 99% of the students.

The one day we learned the most is when the head of the program was ill, and one of our normal teachers came in to take her place.

When the final class came along, an overall review of the whole curriculum, she came BACK to teach the class. Guess what, our grades all dropped like stones again. She even went so far as to deliberately push the test to an unspecified date to force our grades down.

Putting the class strife aside, the major problem with the curriculum is something that they do not tell you in your initial interview (which you must take with the head of the program before they let you into the course)

Your clinical rotations are NOT guaranteed. At all. I had a full six month delay in getting my final rotation, and eventually had to do it at a Veterinary lab just to graduate. I had to threaten legal action with them twice just to get my final rotations.

Finally, just yesterday, after being delayed a total of a full year, I took my Board of Certification Exam and passed. I totally ignored my study materials from my classes and purchased the BOC review guide from the ASCP and passed with that alone as a reference.

The only benefit to the program on the whole is that it did not cost much, and I still got my MLT out of it.

In summary: The teachers themselves are fantastic, the head of the program will do anything in her power to get you to fail the course. You will learn a lot, just not when she takes control. It makes me shudder to think she is part of the ASCP testing board.