Clinical and Diagnostic Sciences Society (CDSS) took students’ breath away with a Valentine’s Day-themed event about the heart’s best friends — the lungs.
On Valentine’s Day, the CDSS hosted a crafts event for students to review their physiology notes and enjoy the weekend with homemade crafts, tie-dyes and more lung puns than one could think of.
“This year, we’ve been getting into more crafty, innovative ideas for meetings and everything,” Beckie Swartz, CDSS president, said. “We really want to create that environment that clinical and diagnostics science students want to be a part of.”
Lake Erie Room, in the Oakland Center’s basement, was the perfect spot for a cozy crafts session and a competitive Kahoot session about the lungs.
“Today was a fun, little quirky, Valentine’s Day-themed event. It really came from the name,” Swartz said. “We were just trying to think of Valentine’s Day themes and then I was like, ‘Falling in Lung.’”
The CDSS has been experimenting with the balance between fun and learning to engage in a more meaningful and impactful way with its growing membership.
“We got a lot of students as well as one of our professors, which was really fun. We got to do a fun craft, which I think is what we’re trying to do this year — merge doing fun things and also learning,” Natalie Ishioka, CDSS secretary, said. “It’s a great opportunity, especially for some of our students who are just freshmen or sophomores, doing things like this is something they can understand because they’ve had physiology, but [it] also is a good refresher for older students.”
Understanding the people in your major and the students that attend your event is a key part of not only making the event engaging but also growing a close community, Swartz explained.
“I really wanted to make that safe little bubble for everyone you know — myself, my friends, everyone that I meet — where they feel safe enough to open up and make long, lasting connections,” Swartz said. “[The CDSS] has had amazing growth. It’s always nice to see new people come in and stay because you’re creating that environment. So it’s really good for our hearts too.”
To achieve more meaningful interactions with their group, the CDSS has focused on how their membership best communicates and what they can benefit from learning.
“Those in clinical and diagnostic sciences, they’re there because they want to make a difference in the healthcare field, but they’re introverted, they don’t want that patient contact — at least from the people that I’ve met and talked to,” Swartz said. “ We have professors that work with us, they’ll come in and speak. We also bring in professionals from the field for specific events and talks, just to give students who don’t know what’s out there yet and give them a perspective on the world around them.”
Catering to a group of students studying a major with so many specializations — Pre-Clinical Sciences, Radiologic Technology and Nuclear Medicine Technology among them — has allowed the CDSS to diversify its events, Ishioka explained.
“Clinical and diagnostic science is a major that has a bunch of sub-specializations under it, so myself, my specialization is Medical Laboratory Science,” Ishioka said. “A lot of people in our club are Pre-Physician Assistants… so we try to do activities that are going to highlight different aspects of the major.”
Next month, around a dozen of the CDSS members will be going to the American Society for Clinical Laboratory Sciences (ASCLS) annual conference in Grand Rapids. The regional meeting will bring together laboratory professionals, vendors, educators and students to network and see groundbreaking technology.
For more CDSS events, please visit the Clinical and Diagnostic Sciences Society’s GrizzOrgs or @ou.cdss on Instagram.
