So, my name is Kelly Chen. I consider myself a Bay
Area native. I grew up in Fremont, and I'm a genetic
counselor. And technically, I guess, my title is perinatal genetic counselor,
so I focus on patients who are pregnant or thinking about pregnancy.
>> And as a genetic counselor, are there subdisciplines? Like, are, I mean,
are there, like, genetic counselors who
focus on, sort of, the non-perinatal aspect?
>> Certainly. So,
this profession's still pretty new. I think, in
the beginning, there weren't that many specialties. It was
either pediatrics, children and, and prenatal was the second,
I think, as, as soon as pregnancy tests started.
And since then, there are several different specialties. The
big ones are pediatrics, prenatal, cancer has become the
hot new thing. counselors who work in a laboratory,
and then specialty counselors who work in certain disciplines
like cardiology or neurology or.
>> Nice. What kind of training was involved? So, once you figured out
that's something you wanted what do you
do to become a genetic counselor, officially?
>> So, it's very specific. So, it's usually a two or three year
master's program specifically in genetic counseling.
So, all the courses are geared towards
the science of genetics and counseling theory. And so right now, I just
did this test. I think there are about 30 programs nationwide. So there
are three in California and then in other states. And
so you still have to apply. Take standard testing like GRE's.
>> Mm-hm.
>> If they're still around. And do some training, like volunteering, in
a healthcare setting, so I volunteered at Planned Parenthood for a year.
>> I see.
>> Doing the pregnancy tests.
>> Cool.
>> And then applied.
>> What are the various backgrounds? Do all genetic counselors have
the same academic training, or, or do they have diverse academic training?
>> So,
yeah, So, counselors come from a wide variety
of backgrounds. they do have in common that they
have to have a master's degree, and the
master's degree programs require an undergraduate, usually four year
college, but, and some prerequisite science courses; Biology,
Chemistry. but other than that, you can be any
major. So, my classmate was a psychology major, I
was a genetics major. Some people were completely not
really seeing either of their specialties as long as they finish their courses.
>> What do you think about the profession itself overall? Is it a
profession that is growing in number, and how is it growing if it is?
>> So, yeah. The profession itself definitely is growing in number. I
don't have year by year, but I think in the very beginning, I
think the first national society started in the late 70s, and then there
were probably ten to 30 members, maybe. And now I think we're up
to, past 2000 nationwide. in the state I'm organizing this conference
coming up so I just did some stats. In this state,
there's probably about 400 licensed genetic counselors. So just to give
a prospective of, we're still a small specialty, but definitely growing.
>> Is, I guess this is sort of more of the personal side, but do you
like being a genetic counselor? Do you feel
like you're helping people? What aspect of doing this
job is probably the best and most fulfilling for you?
>> I think it's a combination of things. Like, this job definitely,
I really enjoy being a genetic counselor, it really fills my niche.
That it combines my interest and my love of science, and specifically
genetics and genetic conditions, with seeing
patients, helping people in a healthcare setting.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So I've been thinking about some of these answers that,
you know, the traditional role for healthcare professional is a doctor.
But doctors have a lot of stress, a lot of
schooling doing treatments and procedures.
And I wasn't necessarily interested in
that part. I was really more interested in communicating to patients,
and feeling like I could help them just using my words.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Or just being there for them and listening
to them. So I really feel that this profession
has been a really good fit for, for, for
me and my personality. So a lot of what I
do is, I think of it as a consultation,
but also just providing information. I see us as a
link between physicians and patients, that traditionally doctors order
tests that are fairly straightforward like a blood count, or
a blood type or something like that. And they
can easily tell a patient what that means in a
sentence. With this genetic testing, it's much more complicated
than that. it's not always a straightforward yes or no,
and doctors don't have time to spend with patients
explaining that. And so I see us as a bridge
between that, being able to help patients decipher and
interpret this information. And then also helping them making decisions
based on those results. because a lot of decisions
to be made, especially in pregnancy are not always medical
decisions, there are person decisions about what patients want to
do about information about their future offspring. so, so prenatal
specifically is an interesting ethical realm because
we're also dealing with pregnancy and, and termination.
>> You do pedigrees, don't you?
>> Yes we do, we always do pedigrees it's kind of our shorthand.
>> Okay.
>> For gathering medical information.
>> Are you fast, are you good? How fast can you like draw a pedigree?
>> I'm pretty, people my colleagues would say I'm too fast at a
lot of things so I'm pretty fast at drawing pedigree. We have colleagues
that don't have the template. That, they used to
have a template, that you could trace a pedigree.
And so I had colleagues who could flip out
that template and do the rotational things. But most
of us can draw freehand pretty well. But now
there are programs that also draw pedigrees because mine
are fairly basic. I take maybe three generations of
pedigrees. So a patient's, their children and their parents.
some pedigrees, like for cancer, where you're really trying to pinpoint
all the individuals with cancer, those pedigrees can get huge, and
then I think the counselors definitely need help with a program
that can kind of line things up and sort things out.
>> Have you ever had to look at a trait?
Or, I don't know, I'm just curious. Have you ever looked
at a trait where no one knows what the inheritance pattern
is yet. Like, have you ever discovered a new inheritance pattern?
[LAUGH]
Like does that happen as a genetic counselor, you
ever looking at traits that no one's ever described before?
>> So that's kind of has two separate questions
so that looking at a pedigree, sometimes we don't
know the inheritance, like it doesn't fit a
traditional dominant or it doesn't fit a traditional recessive.
So that's kind of the fun part of
our job where it's a rare occurrence of something
happening. So it's not, I, I don't think we've
like discovered a new inheritance but we've discovered New
instances of a rare, rare instances of things that
can happen with traditional inheritance patterns. So that's, that's one
way, like, something happens on top of something else,
and that's what gives that pattern. and then we can
also be fooled when people are related to each
other. Because then that throws things, because it could be
a dominant trait, but if there's relatives that are
related to each other, it could be recessive as well.
And then your other question, just about, we certainly have
conditions that nobody's described before. And we see it in
prenatal, but we see more in pediatrics, where a child
comes to us with a unique set of sympoms. And
that's not been described. And so that, that's a cool
part of a pediatric genetics, counseler or doctors job is
they might actually identify a new syndrome. So I haven't
personally been part of that, but my colleges actually have.
And we know physicians who have discovered new conditions.
>> Mm-hm. And have had them named after them.
>> Wow.
>> Yeah.
>> That's crazy. That's pretty cool.
There's somebody watching right now, who's really
interested and wants to know about being a genetic counselor. What would you, do
you have any particular good resource you'd tell them to go visit or
do you have any special message that
you would tell them about genetic counseling?
>> So, yeah, I would highly recommend
the profession if anyone's thinking about genetic counseling.
It's a very good combination and medicine and health care, and interacting with
patients. So we call that a clinical kind of job. If you like patients,
and if you like the specific field of genetics, because that's pretty much what
we're talking about. So if you don't
like genetics, I wouldn't recommend this profession.
[LAUGH]
But if you want to work with people but still
be in, tune with the science, it's a really good profession.
There are a lot of counselors who work part time. And
we don't take call like physicians or nurses. And so for
those again who want to go into medicine but don't
want the extra stress of those kinds of things, it's a
really nice profession. lot of, lots of counselors work part time
again because we're seeing patients and they can be scheduled appointments.
the salaries I think, especially with our certification
and licensure, hopefully are starting to increase and
there's certainly a lot of job opportunity. So
I would highly recommend checking out the websites and
talking to a direct counselor if you can.
Even shadowing a counselor and doing some volunteer work
in health care, just to make sure that's the area that they like to be in, yeah.
>> Great, it sounds like great advice. Thank you so much.
>> Thank you very much for the opportunity.
[BLANK_AUDIO].