Electives in Biochem/MolecularBio

[Buffalo333]

My daughter will be a junior this fall in a Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Major. She hopes to eventually get an MS or PhD in Genetics or Cancer Biology or something similar and eventually work in laboratory research. She is trying to map out her courseload for the next two years. She has two or three elective (?) courses to select and is considering biostatistics, microbiology, bioinformatics, multivariable calculus or a second computer science class. If she could take them all, she would do so but that is not an option. She has completed her calculus and physics requirements for the major, but she figures that another math-related course or two might be a good thing. Or microbiology might be useful. This whole business is mostly greek to me but I thought that somebody out there might be able to make some suggestions as to what might look better on her grad school applications. Thank you for your help.

[Eigen]

No offense intended, but if your daughter is a junior, and interested in graduate school, shouldn't she be the one posting here looking for direction?

I would recommend that she talk to her current professors (or she might have already) about possible electives that would look good for graduate school.

By and large, I would recommend against taking things specifically because they will "look good on grad school applications". Take things that you are interested, and help you gain expertise that will be beneficial in your area of research- that interest and solid background in an area is what will look good to graduate programs. You want to have a relatively well defined set of interests, and once you do you will be able to see what courses will best provide background and support.

[Tsujiru]

I would echo what Eigen suggests - take the subjects that she feels most passionate about. Half way through college I found the subject that I wanted to devote myself to (in my case developmental biology, which I'm now doing in my PhD). If I'd just wanted to boost my GPA I would have stuck with math and physics courses which I tended to do well in. At least at the beginning, molecular biology was much harder for me and I actually received my lowest mark in college in my developmental biology course, and I worried that this might make it more difficult for me to argue that this was what I wanted to do in graduate school. Fortunately this was not the case, and in fact it helped me to differentiate between the kind of work within the field that I find fascinating and the kind of work that puts me right to sleep (oh no, please no more about mouse renal development...). In the end, yes what appears on your transcript matters to a certain extent, but having an area you care deeply about and can discuss intelligently in interviews as well as having strong letters of recommendation from research mentors will matter more.