You’re trying to get into medical school and researching genetics in the meantime

man doing a sample test in the laboratory

It’s been five years since that fateful career fair. You went into pre-med to take all sorts of biology and chemistry classes. While you did okay on the MCAT, you haven’t done well enough to get into medical schools you applied for. You are still attempting to get in but in the mean time you began a graduate school program specializing in genetics. Specializing in advanced cases of Russocarcinoma, you are attempting to find what genetic traits put people at a higher risk.

You’ve been so busy with your research, you haven’t seen your family since your cousins wedding last Spring and have barely talked to anyone outside of your research associates. Your world is filled CNV data, python visualization libraries and pub med articles cataloguing and associating the many different traits which are now super easy to sequence. You made a point to drive home for Thanksgiving and you can finally catch up with not only your parents and siblings but even some of your extended family!

Your mom gives you a hug, you all sit down to snack on artichoke dip and she asks, “Tell me about school! What are you researching? Cure cancer yet?” the room laughs and waits in anticipation. What do you do?

Sure, I’d love to explain my research

Oh I don’t know, it’s so complicated and specialized now, I don’t think y’all would be interested

Published by B McGraw

B McGraw has lived a long and successful professional life as a software developer and researcher. After completing his BS in spaghetti coding at the department of the dark arts at Cranberry Lemon in 2005 he wasted no time in getting a masters in debugging by print statement in 2008 and obtaining his PhD with research in screwing up repos on Github in 2014. That's when he could finally get paid. In 2018 B McGraw finally made the big step of defaulting on his student loans and began advancing his career by adding his name on other people's research papers after finding one grammatical mistake in the Peer Review process.

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