During my undergrad years, I started working for an infectious disease/immunology-focused lab, where I discovered how much I enjoyed biomedical research. It was very fulfilling in terms of creativity to come up with your own scientific questions and put together plans to answer them. Although I still planned on applying to medical school after graduating, I wanted to spend a gap year continuing to do research since I had enjoyed it so much. I ended up joining an immunology-focused lab, and through various seminars and conversations, I realized I was really interested in the engineering and the development side of research, which led to my decision to scrap my application to medical school.
At the time, there was a lot of buzz about the vast amounts of data being generated in science and the continuous need for tools to help analyze this data, which is how I discovered bioinformatics. I had only taken a few classes on genomics and computational biology as an undergrad. Although they had been very interesting, there didn’t seem to be much application to my medical career goals. So, I was interested in learning more about bioinformatics and decided to apply for a Master’s degree to dedicate some time to learning how to develop tools to analyze biomedical data. Post-Master’s degree, I did a fellowship at the National Institute of Health and worked at the Vaccine Research Center. That position became very demanding during the pandemic, but it was exciting to have access to data generated in real-time that was constantly changing. This research environment also made tool development and innovation more critical, reaffirming that I had made the right decision to pursue a bioinformatician career.
