Interactions with them and other scientists add to my knowledge and way of thinking. My favorite part of my job is working on projects I have not imagined before. The number of species I work with is growing, continuously adding to the knowledge base. My biggest challenge is dividing time equally between projects to get a good outcome while maintaining a thread on other projects.
What advice do you have for a student interested in your industry? What skills are most crucial?
SS: Some advice for students interested in my field is to try to build your own project! There are so many great resources available online that can help you get started on your own project, and the nice thing is that they can all be done from your computer.
Some more technical skills that are important for a bioinformatician to develop are a strong foundation in biology and computer science. Additionally, bioinformatics involves a lot of data analysis and programming, so it's important to have experience with these skills by learning statistics and programming languages like Python and R. Also, good communication skills are very useful. Because we work with diverse groups of people of various disciplines, it's important to be able to communicate with experts and non-experts and work collaboratively with others.
SG: Newcomers in the field would need to have computational skills. It is good to concentrate on a scripting language of your choice. R is relatively easy to pick up. There are many modules available to use. It is important to focus on the flowchart (i.e., method of analysis). Try to develop a logical workflow and then start coding.
