The State of My Union

September 26th, 2004 Chris Posted in Uncategorized |

For those who don’t know me personally, I’m a fifth year senior here at Truman, double majoring in Biology and Computer Science. Seeing as how this is my final year, I’m making all of the usual preparations for graduation and putting together plans for my post-Truman life.

Right now, the plan is to stay in academia for an indeterminate amount of time. I’m planning to go to grad school next fall, though where I will be is still up in the air. I’m looking to earn my PhD in Computational Biology or Bioinformatics, which should take about 5 years. After that, I think I’d like to become a professor and teach/mentor at a collegiate level.

I’m well aware that I could make a shit-ton more money by heading to the private sector, but something about that kind of work just leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I’d have no academic freedom to pursue interesting research. At a place like that, you pursue the company’s goals, and the bottom line drives all of your decisions. I hate working on things I don’t care about, and besides - selling out to the man is not my style.

There are lots of things I love about academia - one is the aforementioned freedom. Another is being surrounded by people who share my passion for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge. I don’t ever want to live without that. I can’t stand mainstream culture and the opiate of the masses - television. College campuses are rife with social activism, inqusitive minds, and people who care
about more than which fictional characters are dating on ‘Friends’.

So it’s off to grad school I go! I’ve started preparations, like signing up to take the GRE and getting things together like letters of recommendation and transcripts. The next step, which I’ve been putting off forever, is doing some solid research on schools.

For my convenience, I’m using the bookmarks manager at del.icio.us to organize my stuff. It’s a social bookmarks manager, which means my links are viewable by anyone, so if you’re curious as to how the search is going, you can take a look at my list of grad school links at any time. So far, I’ve pulled out a list of schools that appear to programs compatible with what I’m looking for. The next step is to examine each school’s faculty research interests to see who I’d be interested in working under (I’ll post more on my specific interests in a later post).

I used to be dead-set on getting out of the midwest, but the more I look at schools, the more I realize that the programs there supersede any kind of geographic considerations. That’s not to say I’d pass up a great offer from a school in San Francisco, but it’s no longer as much of an issue. As long as I’m on a decent-sized campus in a decent-sized town, I’ll be happy. After all, if I’ve survived in Kirksville for this long, I’m pretty sure that I can be happy about anywhere.