Recent Thoughts on Application

The last month or so has been filled with getting some projects for work finished and a few other things, as well as working on this paper that I’d like to submit something this summer. The application system opened up earlier this week and I’ve had a chance to peruse it somewhat and look at what I’m going to be spending the bulk of my time on over the next month or so. I may even set this paper aside for a while and focus on getting my application complete. My committee letter process is mostly finished, I just need to interview with a committee member and get the last of my letters of recommendation submitted.

I’ve also been giving a lot of thought to what I want to do in graduate school and, by extension, the types of programs I want to apply to. I’ve more or less concluded that I want to do my research in a quantitative field like genetics, computation biology, statistics, or something along those lines. I’ve got a large background and interest in mathematics and the hard sciences, so it really seems like I’d be ignoring that if I tried to shoehorn myself into a biology lab. I’d much rather spend my graduate school years in front of a computer than a bench. Ever since I started this process I’d been secretly hoping I could do something like that and it wasn’t until the last few months that I began to realize that sort of niche might actually exist in medicine. Perhaps it doesn’t get talked about a lot because most premeds don’t know anything about programming or numerical analysis. Regardless, I do and I’m going to apply to schools that have those types of programs.

The lady has become quite a bit more amenable to the idea of not necessarily moving back to her home town after she finishes residency. My mentor is from Boston and thinks that I should give a lot of thought towards applying to Harvard-MIT. I have a really hard time thinking that programs like that might ever give me the time of day. At any rate, I’m going to expand my list of schools and cast a much wider net I think, giving specific notice to schools that have graduate programs in areas that really align with my own interests and backgrounds. I’ve never had any plans to park my ass in a biochemistry lab hunting for proteins. That’s interesting and certainly important work, but it isn’t what interests me. I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life working with computers, hacking code, and playing with numbers. I’d be a fool to throw all of that away and pretend that it has no application to medical research.

Hopefully I can find a few admissions committees that are willing to roll the dice on that sort of thing.