I Am Attracted to the Graduate Program in Genetics :: Graduate Admissions Essays

Excited by the idea of fit a scientist since I was a small child, my amuses in pursuing tweak studies intensified during my under fine-tune education and my question experience. Rather than discouraging me with the marvellous amount of work and demands for creativity, my college years motivated me to earn a Ph.D. and to address pursuing a career as a inquiry scientist. Although my use up research goals have yet to be refined, my interests include studying the familial basis of disease and the genetic mechanisms that govern various cellular processes, such(prenominal) as the cell cycle, apoptosis, and tumor formation. Although I entered college without a clear research direction, the Biotechnology Program at Rochester Institute of Technology helped develop my interest in the field of Genetics. I found much of my science laboratory instruction at RIT to be extremely rewarding. For example, one experience that early on convinced me to seriously consider genetics was a projec t involving the structure and characterization of a recombinant plasmid. Since I worked independently for the most part, the project compete a key role in increasing my confidence and share me to understand various concepts pertaining to genetic analysis. It was this experience that motivated me to seek a position as a teacher s assistant for a crinkle in Microbial and Viral Genetics. As a TA, I wise(p) how demanding the teaching situation is and how much teaching a course prat contribute to my own learning. By this time, after discovering my passion for research and the pleasure of teaching, I began to seriously contemplate graduate schools. To excel in graduate school, I decided I would not limit my experience to my conventional education at RIT. Instead, I wanted the opportunity to research my career options to make a well-informed decision as to the domain of my future research. With these goals in mind, I chose to take advantage of RIT s accommodative Education Pro gram, which meant earning my Bachelor s degree in five years alternatively of four. In December of 1997,Astra Arcus USA Pharmaceuticals hired me as a research assistant in the Electrophysiology department. At Astra, I learned research techniques not taught by RIT. For the past year, I have been works with a subset of neuronal glutamate receptors via voltage clamping on Xenopus oocytes. The research of our lab is geared toward the study of central nervous system diseases.