Glory

Besides the pretty-darn-decent pay you'll be pulling in, there are a ton of opportunities in genetics to contract a serious case of the warm fuzzies. (And no, before you ask, that's not a hereditary condition.)

If you're not solving the puzzle of an insidious inherited disease or helping to protect a family's long-term health by analyzing their inner-innards, then you're probably teaching a fresh-faced generation of budding scientists to do one of those things for you. Basically, if you call yourself a geneticist, nine out of ten times you're either helping people, or helping people help people.

If this is your day job, then you should smile as widely as your genetically pre-determined mouth will allow you to.