Continuing Education

So lately I've been considering, a lot, what I'm going to do after graduation. (How I realized I could have graduated this semester if I had been so inclined is another story)

I know I want to go to graduate school, that much is certain. However, I don't know if I want to do a masters or a PhD program. I know I can put in two more years, but I'm balking at the thought of four or more. Especially when my future plans aren't set in academia.

I want to work for the government, ideally as a weapons analyst. In the defense capacity, not offensively. I am so ethically opposed to the idea of engineering organisms for strategic purposes (translation: biological weapons) that it is slightly painful. But at the same time, I know there are people and groups out there researching and doing just that. And we need to be prepared.

This desire probably stems from my literary love for spy and crime novels, as well as the books by Richard Preston. In fact, his books are primarily what I want to do with my life--be on the defensive for whatever is out there waiting to infect and attack the human race.

In principle, these things aren't difficult, just time-consuming. But there are people who have nothing but time to tinker in a lab with the same skills I'm learning in classes (transformation, mutagenesis, etc), with potentially crippling results.

It doesn't even have to be something engineered. During irradication, it was determined that smallpox only needs 20,000 people within a two-week radius of each other to survive. Heck, there's more than that in a 15 minute radius on my college campus on any given weekday. Other diseases, like polio or measles, can have vast damaging effects, especially in an age where more and more people are refusing to vaccinate their kids. One day at the swimming pool and you can have at outbreak. In the 1980s, the Rajneeshees reminded us of our weakness to plain old Salmonella typhimurium by spreading it on the salad bar.

I want to do work with things like this, in a microbiologist's capacity. However, I'm not sure if I really have it in me to get a PhD, or if I even need a PhD to do these things. I don't want to run the show, I just want to get in the game.