BENCHMARK

Last summer I attended a math and science summer program at the University of Michigan to discover more about regenerative medicine.  Instead, I became intrigued by genetics.

If I am considering pursuing a career in genetics, I need to know what types of careers are out there in the field of genetics.  That is the main topic of my masterpiece: what a future with a passion for genetics may hold as well as a look at what genetics has already achieved.  I actually just recently wrote an essay for a
scholarship from the DNA Diagnostics Center where I had to predict where the study of DNA would be in five, ten, and twenty years.  I hit two birds with one stone by writing the essay for the scholarship and doing research for the essay that also helped me with my  masterpiece research to find a couple of resources.

I still need to contact an expert in genetics or career in genetics, like genetic counseling.  One of the problems is finding an expert like this in our smallish town.  I do have the email of a research scientist in genetics who came during that summer program to give a speech on determining the gene responsible for height in mice because its location could be similar to the location of the gene responsible for height in humans.  The main problem I have is actually contacting the experts; I love the concept of contacting them and forming those connections, but I don't know what to talk to them about, what to ask them.

I'm also going to have so much information about or relating to genetics that I don't know how I am going to condense it or even begin to organize it into a comprehensible presentation. This brings me to my other obstacle.  Genetics is a bit of a complicated topic for those students that haven't taken biology or AP biology recently, and I want everyone in class to be able to understand the accomplishments or my interest in genetics, something that will be hard to understand if they don't understand what DNA and genes are.