Finding College Direction for a Career in DARPA Muscle Research

[troupkid]

I'm a high school student, looking for colleges.

This is what I want to do as a career:

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/03/darpa-muscle-re.html

Any suggestions on what I would major in for this? Asking for suggestions on a college might be much :P

Thanks! :mrgreen:

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Any sort of field of biology would work or even possibly biomedical engineering. The exact subfield of biology would be developmental biology, but any program that teaches molecular and/or cell biology would cover developmental biology well.

 

[troupkid]

Thanks! Do you think it would make a difference if I went pre-med or not?

 

[Ygggdrasil]

After you obtain your undergrad degree, do you want to go to medical school and become a doctor, go to graduate school and become a researcher, or go to an MD-PhD program and do both? If you want to enter an MD or MD-PhD program, you would need to fulfill the pre-med requirements. If you just would like to obtain a PhD, not all of the pre-med requirements are necessary (although preparation for graduate study of biology is almost the same the preparation for medical school).

If you'd like to do research to study the fundamental biology of tissue regeneration and apply the knowledge to creating new therapies, a PhD would be sufficient. Having an MD-PhD certainly opens up more opportunities for research, but the downside of an MD-PhD program is that it takes a very long time (6-10 years versus 4 years for an MD and 4-6 years for a PhD).

If you'd like to keep your options open, it wouldn't hurt to plan to take a pre-med curriculum. It shouldn't be much different than that of a non-pre-med biology student, so it would not make much of a difference either way.

 

[troupkid]

Thanks so much, yeah, I'm still trying to keep my options open.