Graduate School... the next step!

I've been working here in Japan for 1 year and I will be continuing for another year until July of 2007. At that time I wish to return to the US and enter into graduate school. Thus, I am now in the process of applying for such schools. My undergraduate field was Zoology, with a Genetics minor. For grad school I will be studying Virology. (viruses) May sound boring to most, but to me it is like the coolest thing on Earth. I love genetics, in all actuallity, and my work in the Wheat Genetics Lab at my university was the most rewarding thing that I've ever done. The problem that I find with genetics, or rather, the annoying little thing, is that you can never look at the full picture in full detail. The human genome is so long that it took years and years just to sequence it all. There is no way that you could try and process it all individually without some magical supercomuter from the future. The wheat genome is a number of times larger than the human genome! So you work on one process that is regulated by one group of proteins on a specific section of the genome. But then you find that there are other proteins at work in this process (as there always are) and you have to talk to someone else who is an expert on those proteins from some far away segment of DNA. And so on... and so forth... Of course, it works, you get the picture figured out, but it would be so much more satisfying if you could look at the bigger picture without burning out all of your brain cells.

But virus (viruses) are cool! They are so simple and yet do so much. And their genome is short!! I mean really short!! This means that you can know all of the proteins formed from what parts of the genome and etc. and you just need to put the pieces together and figure out what is happening. I mean, yes, it is a little more complicated than that, and viruses work with the body, so some other proteins from the body can come in and interact with them in some vital part of the process. But still... viruses are just cool! So cool! And so, because I think they are cool, I want to work with them. I may be crazy to find viruses so fascinating, but that doesn't really bother me. ;) I think you're crazy for not finding them fascinating!