I advise students interested in preparing themselves for physician’s assistant programs. Additionally, I am the lone advisor for the Biology with Biotech degree option. The biotech curriculum is designed to provide the students with the opportunity to build a skillset suitable to launch them into a career in the biotech industry or into graduate programs in molecular biology, biotechnology, genetics, immunology, etc.
The backbone of the biotech curriculum is the year-long biotech series (BIOL484 485, 488, 490A). This experience affords the students the opportunity to become “comfortable at the bench”. Because it is impossible to teach each student “all” of the techniques, we don’t try to do so. Instead, we focus on helping our students achieve four general goals; 1) become proficient with a set of techniques that are common to many fields; 2) learn how to troubleshoot problems; 3) learn how to design and execute a research project, and 4) learn how to learn. Students who achieve these goals are “comfortable at the bench” and are capable of working independently and effectively performing novel tasks successfully.
