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Mastering your view of biology
Don�t be put off by what you learnt in school. Studying for a Masters in Biology at a top graduate school will be a very different experience as topgradschool.com finds out.
In recent months international newspapers ranging from The Times of London and The Washington Post to The Straits Times in Singapore have reflected on the growing concerns about the manipulation of human genes. There has been a continuing debate over the research into stem cells and the production of so-called �designer� cells to counter hereditary or terminal illnesses. For the prospective international student considering graduate school and a masters or PhD degree, perhaps there has never been a more critical time to focus on the biological sciences as an area of academic specialization.
Like many of the sciences studied, taught and researched at graduate level, biology is considerably more complex than the subject most of us encountered earlier in life. The biology of our school years is a distant relative to the one offered at masters and PhD levels, where the provision of specialized degrees dominates most departments of biological sciences. Based on the historical development of biology from the nineteenth century, programs are offered in categories grouped by the type of organisms they focus on and the scale at which they are studied. This results in a picture that offers botany, zoology and microbiology on one hand and biochemistry, molecular biology, cellular biology, physiology and ecology on the other.
Karen Myhr, Assistant Professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, USA teaches on both the Masters in Biological Sciences and Biotechnology and recalls why she found the subject matter so compelling: �I was drawn to sciences because I wanted to understand how things around me worked. In high school I became fascinated with how the brain functions because it was so wonderfully complex. In college I took psychology courses, which explained the brain from a cognitive perspective. This was interesting but I wanted to understand the brain at a cellular level.�
The programs offered by Wayne State University typically prepare students for a range of related careers in the USA and other countries. Recent graduates have entered academic and corporate environments, either as researchers or as senior staff members where knowledge of technical advances in areas such as molecular biology are centrally important. Casey Kandow, a graduate of the Masters in Biotechnology program in May 2008 now works for the American Red Cross: �My experiences in the program and internship have given me practical knowledge, as well as marketable skills invaluable to anyone entering the expanding field of molecular biotechnology.�
Professor Myhr sees the relationship between her thirst for knowledge as an undergraduate and her current teaching position as intimately related and one that helps to encourage new graduate students interested in biological sciences: �Now as a biology professor I get to study the latest advances in our understanding of brain function. I get to design and execute experiments that will give us the answers. I can�t do this alone so I have a team of undergraduate and graduate students to get the experiments done. This aspect of my job is fulfilling because I am training the next generation of scientists.�
According to the UK�s Higher Education Statistics Agency latest report on the destination of leavers from higher education, only 13.7% of masters graduates went onto PhD study, leaving the majority to enter the labour market.
Employment prospects for graduates of biological sciences programs, either at the masters or PhD levels are currently very encouraging. The field is so diverse with its increasing range of specializations that career opportunities are available on almost every continent. According to the UK�s Higher Education Statistics Agency latest report on the destination of leavers from higher education, only 13.7% of masters graduates went onto PhD study, leaving the majority to enter the labour market. Employment sectors and specific careers vary with science, management, professional and technical occupations being the most popular. Interestingly, where graduates entered employment with a scientific role they did so in areas closely related to their subject of study, with biochemists, medical scientists, conservation and environmental protection officers and scientific researchers being most prominent.
