is how to answer the question why do you want to become a genetic counselor welcome to genetic counseling awareness channel with katie lee all the best resources you'll ever need a genetic counselling awareness channel good morning you guys it's me katie lee cgc and welcome back to my channel today i wanted to record one last topic about genetic counseling interviews this year i know some of you are still out interviewing so hopefully this might come in time if you haven't nailed the answer to this specific question yet and then i also wanted to let you
know that next week wednesday the first wednesday in april i'm planning to release a video on ranking on how to rank what i did is i interviewed a few current students who ranked just a year ago and i got their feedback on what system they used to rank their list for match day and how it went for them so if you're not feeling super confident about ranking or you just want to hear someone else's experience about how they ranked um to give yourself some confidence and to get that list submitted you can check it out
next wednesday so let's get to the current topic which is how to answer the question why do you want to become a genetic counselor this is a question that if you're hoping to get into a program for 2021 admission you've probably answered dozens and dozens of times in personal statements and again in many interviews and what i want to say for those of you who maybe are thinking about applying next time is to start realizing that all of the interviewers you speak to they're speaking to dozens and reading dozens of personal statements from people that
like genetic counseling for the same general reasons that you probably like genetic counseling so you absolutely cannot give the answer that i want to be a genetic counselor because i really like science and i was fascinated by genetics it's so cool and i also wanted to be in the helping career and also like the idea of being able to interact with patients interact with people regularly that answer is so tired it's so boring it's so non-specific i think the vast majority of people who want to become a genetic counselor like science or genetics duh and
they also want human interaction now things are changing and not all genetic counselors interact with patients regularly or interact with clinicians regularly so that does not have to be the case that that's your why but i've just heard that answer so many times and i don't even participate in interviewing students for any program when i'm talking to somebody who has asked me to do an informational interview or helping somebody prepare their essay or practice interviewing that answer comes up all the time and you should not use it you need something more specific you do not
want to bore your interviewers on the first question so you need to dig way deeper for your why that's great if you like genetics but what do you like about genetics why do you like genetics and it's great if you want to help people that's a great reason to become a genetic counselor but who specifically do you want to help why do you want to help them um how do you want to help them okay i wish i could remember exactly what i said for my answer to this question but i tried to recreate what
i think i would have said as much as possible and i do remember some of the specific points that i wove into my answer still you want to keep it short i mean this isn't rocket science this isn't a hard question if someone asked me in 2012 2013 when i was interviewing and applying why i wanted to be a genetic counselor this is what i would say growing up i always loved babysitting and nannying and i still do one of the reasons i enjoy nanny and so much is because i adore being around children and
i understand that genetic counseling could give me an opportunity to work with children and their families the second reason i love nanny so much is because it gives me an opportunity to see into a household that's different from mine and to observe how the parents interact with each other how they run their household and how they parent for a long time i thought i would become a marriage and family therapist because it fit with my personal interests and my communication abilities but during college i took a neuroscience course and i was fascinated by that topic
led to an epigenetics course which was even more fascinating to me the undergraduate neuroscience club i was in at uw-madison was looking for volunteers to socialize with patients at the uw hospital locked psychiatric ward and that sounded fascinating to me because i have always loved reading memoirs about people with psychiatric diagnoses which has really fueled my interest in learning more about them so during that experience i got to interact with people you know with bipolar disorder with eating disorders with schizophrenia with major depression and so forth so many patients wondered why me will my kids
get this what did i do to cause this what causes this mental illness and they just weren't getting the answer despite so many specialists being involved in their care and their treatment it wasn't something that was readily discussed simultaneously i was exploring the field of genetic counseling and seeing if it might be a good career fit for me and i came to understand that genetic counselor's role is often to support patients and their families in understanding the scientific explanation for why a diagnosis why a disease happened to them or happened to a family member and
i thought that this would be the perfect fit for me i am especially interested in either working with children with genetic diagnoses or expanding the psychiatric genetic counseling field i understand it's really small but i think there's massive space for it to grow all right i hope that advice helped and again remember to tune in next wednesday when i'll be talking to some current students about how they ranked for match shay and you can get their advice and feedback as you are building your match list bye guys
