Medicine!

Hi!
I'm Ken, another former Mr. Baker student. I took his AP biology class in 1999-2000, and I can honestly say that without Mr. Baker's class, there's a good chance I would not have ended up in the biosciences. You're lucky to be where you are! I remember drawing diagrams of helicase unzipping a coil of DNA, and that's still pretty much the model I have in my head.

After high school I went to the University of Washington, double-majored in Computer Science and Molecular Biology (and minored in math for good measure). At the same time, I shot pictures for UW's student newspaper, which is where I learned I needed a career where I was intimately involved with all types of people every single day. So I went to medical school! I'm in my fourth and final year at Columbia in New York, where I've confirmed that medicine is exactly the right career for me. And it opens doors to do anything from solely practicing clinical medicine, to answering the unanswered questions of life (and that's what biology is, anyway), to teaching next year's doctors.

There are many, many, many questions yet to be answered in medicine and in biology. Science gives us the tools to answer these questions. The most popular article on the New York Times' website right now is about a possible link between coffee drinking and lowered dementia risk (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/health/research/24coffee.html). The research is preliminary (they allude to why in the NYT article) and there is a lot of work to be done to either prove or disprove this hypothesis. Are you going to be the one that solves this? If you're really interested, you can dig up the actual article - an abstract, or summary, is at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19158424