Interestingly, as a recently graduated masters student, I realize that I grew up in a sort of technological transition phase. While in school, computers were tools and such for doing homework or gaming, but nobody really explained how they worked. They were just there and did whatever the premade software and your input told them to do. As I continued my education, tech became more and more integrated and the claim was that it would make tasks easier and easier, but the latter part did not ring true. The deeper I got into research, the bigger the push I got to actually learn how to write my own programs. I, admittedly, had my hesitations about this subject. As a biologist who did primarily bench work, writing programs for data analysis was completely foreign to me. All of those brackets, seemingly arbitrary spaces and abbreviations, and the bizarre syntax were all off-putting because it was unlike any normal human language I had studied before. I was far more experienced and knowledgeable in dissecting, analyzing, and explaining the processes in living things than in chips and wires. However, at that point, I had attended several conferences and the most prominent presentations were derived from those who had successfully integrated computer science into their biology work. So, I finally saw the writing on the wall and decided that it was time to educate myself to fill in the gaping holes I had in my knowledge base. This is still an ongoing process for me at the moment, but the longer I dive into this realm of vectors and concatenated strings, the more that I’m beginning to understand. What was once just cybernetic gibberish is now slowly coalescing into comprehensible commands and framework. So, as I continue on my journey, I will keep everyone posted. Thank you for reading!

Stranger in a Strange Land

Post navigation


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *