Each year at the Medical College of Georgia, Anatomic Pathology celebrates NMLW with a cookout or picnic  in the courtyard of our amazing Pathology Building at the Medical College of Georgia surrounded by beautiful scenery and spring time 80--degree weather ---and, we don't forget, tech celebration is always the week following the famous Masters Golf Tournament here in Augusta where the azaleas and dogwood are still in bloom.  

We always have a "lab committee" to include representatives from each lab to give ideas during lab week (contest, food, displays, etc).  This way more people will participate if there is a rep "pushing people to gear up for this week".  Last year faculty, staff and residents donated several items for prizes and we had "count the cassettes" game.  Tissue cassettes were placed in a big glass jar and everyone participated by guessing how many were in there.  Prizes went to the top three with  answers closest to the correct number.  Posters were also displayed during the week throughout the Department.

This year we treated our technical staff to a good ole' southern barbecue  in our courtyard.  There was a baby picture contest where everyone participated and the outcome was 4 top winners (all four gave the correct answers).  Many of our faculty, residents and staff donate money/gifts and some of our vendors also donated very nice prizes.  One of the displays this year was called, "Pathological Antiquities".  Since the Medical College of Georgia was founded back in the 1850s, there were several items that the department had kept that were related to histology such as microscopes over 100 years old (and we also displayed a notebook involving "history of the microscope"); old cassettes/new cassettes; old specimen jars/new way of storing specimens; cassette labelling (old and new); lantern slides with a history of these unusual process performed back in the 1800's versus photography of today; pictures of old equipment used over fifty years ago; a write up of how histology was performed back in the 1890's (Turn-around-time was about 2 weeks - wow!).  This display was very interesting and everyone seemed to enjoy this very much.  Everyone had so much fun and really looks forward to celebrating this week in our Department.  We have already began preparing for next year.