Study Genetics at Otago

Conor McGuinness:

Hi, I’m Conor. I’m a PhD student at Otago, currently studying breast cancer genetics. I went through my undergrad in Genetics, and I really chose Genetics because it fostered my love of Biology. Coming out of high school, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do. I did the first year Health Sci, and then Genetics just opened and welcomed me with open arms. Through the labs, the teaching, and all the helpful staff, they really helped me to develop my research skills so that I can implement them in the great research program that Otago offers.

Associate Professor Caroline Beck:

Hi everybody, I’m Associate Professor Caroline Beck, and I’m the Director of the Genetics Teaching Program at the University of Otago. I’ll tell you a little bit about our program here at Otago. Genetics is obviously the study of genes and inheritance, and as a science, it underpins research in a multitude of areas. This can vary from conservation genetics to agriculture, aquaculture, all the way through to health and disease, and understanding complex diseases in our society.

So that’s what we do, and as a student of genetics, what you would do is come to Otago in your first year, where you would study two papers called Cells 191 and Chemistry 191. These are part of the first year health sciences program of papers. You would take these two papers, and we also recommend that you take a statistics paper, either STAT 110 or STAT 115, and Biochemistry 192. That still leaves you a few papers that you can use to put some interest into your science around genetics.

Genetics goes really, really well with other sciences. It goes well with Law, it goes well with Business, so you can put genetics together with a whole bunch of different topics. When you study genetics, your first year will consist of those initial papers, and that’s about a third genetics in that. Then, when you come into second year, you start to study with us. We have three papers in second year that you need to take, and you’ve got four papers that you can take to supplement that. We recommend things like Microbiology and Biochemistry to supplement those papers and to go well with them.

In third year, there’s a choice of four out of six papers that you can do. All of our papers are very laboratory-based, so from the very minute you walk into the university, you’re going to be doing bench work, experiments, and learning hands-on. We also, of course, have our lectures to complement that, and we try and bring our lectures and our labs together to tell a story.

We’re also very fortunate at Otago that we have a large number of genetics researchers all around the university, working in different departments. These departments include Anatomy, Biochemistry, Microbiology, Zoology, and Botany.