Egunduz - Bioinformatics Pathway

Certificates June 2020 Certificates Bioinformatics Workflow Self-Assessments
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Concise overview of things learned:

  • Leadership: These past weeks, I have learned the importance and necessity of delegation. Admittedly, being able to delegate was something I always strived to improve but during this internship, I better understood that your team members will have different strengths than you, and for their betterment, learning, and skill advancement as well, delegation can help the project move forward and succeed to a higher degree. I am very proud of this acquired knowledge and hope to apply it to future projects.
  • Soft Skills: I continue to learn how to apply creativity to leadership. With team members’ roles shifting and due to other circumstances, sub-teams need to be re-organized, which requires some creativity. Additionally, it definitely takes creativity to find ways to increase buy-in and engagement from team members to create and sustain a more interactive environment for the team as a whole.
  • Technical Area: This past week, I further expanded my knowledge on ways to interpret different data sets and visualizations of plots, and how it relates back to bioinformatics. By having a good understanding of this, I was able to relay information back to my team concerning the deliverables. This past weekend, I also learned about different gene set enrichment tools and how they can be applied to our project.

Three achievement highlights:

  • Created an open environment for my team, so they feel comfortable asking questions and sharing thoughts / concerns.
  • Helped create an atmosphere where the team feels empowered and can improve their own soft skills, like communication through their weekly presentations, creativity through sub-team-organized happy hour, and teamwork by working together to submit deliverables.
  • Helped organize educational webinars that advanced the learning of both BI teams.

List of meetings/trainings organized including social team events:

  • Organized two weekly team meetings, and a team happy hour. Also helped organize office hours and technical webinars for both BI teams.

Goals for the upcoming week:

  • Next week, I plan to go over the deliverables in more detail and the importance of each step, to better facilitate understanding of them.
  • During our soft skills discussion, I will help discuss how to best build a resume, what facets to identify, and how to best distribute it (as per a request).

Detailed statement of tasks done:

  • Organized, explained and assigned both Week 4 and Week 5 deliverables.
  • Encouraged the use of Slack, Asana, and GitHub as tools for communication, project management, and collaboration, respectively.
  • Helped some team members understand the roles and responsibilities of being a project lead and project manager, and encouraged their interest to take on these new roles for the next session.
  • Communicated with my team through the STEM-Away channel, email, and meetings, to elucidate what to expect for the week, how to complete the deliverables, answer any question, and helped them deliver their weekly presentations, which were all great!
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Week 5 Self-Assessment

Concise overview of things learned:

  • Technical Areas:
    –> I worked with Goral to set up a GitHub repository for our team
    –> Learned more about gene ontology analysis and how to apply it to our dataset
    –> Learned about different functions I could apply to perform KEGG pathway analysis
    –> Learned about Wikipathways analysis and different external tools that can also be used for this. These external pathways include EnrichR, David, and Metascape.
  • Leadership and Soft Skills:
    –> I was able to increase my communication skills with my team and mentors about the technical details of the task
    –> Learned how to maintain a large team on a completely virtual platform
    –> Come up with new methods to increase and maintain engagement from the team
    –> Learned how to take constructive criticism and feedback on how to improve as a leader, and apply it to be a better leader for my team

Three achievement highlights:

  • I am growing my network on LinkedIn every day
  • Empowered my team to feel comfortable during presentations and when they are communicating to team
  • Kept participants and observers engaged and active

List of meetings/training organized including social team events:

  • Organized two team meetings and a team happy hour (this was a special happy hour as we said goodbye to the amazing Bioinformagicians that were leaving our team)
  • Helped organize a BI-wide office hours for all members of both BI teams
  • Attended both technical training sessions with the mentors

Goals for the upcoming week:

  • Keep encouraging participants and observers to ask questions and use the resources available to them.
  • Keep growing my network during the internship and maintain these connections post STEM-Away
  • Along with my discussion for how to build and distribute a resume, I would like to hold a conversation concerning entrepreneurship and how it can be pursued from a plethora of different backgrounds.
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Week 6 Self-Assessment

Concise overview of things learned:

  • Leadership and Soft Skills:
    –> Every time I deliver a presentation to my team on soft skills (for example, last week I gave an informative presentation of how to build the perfect resume and what methods should be used for distribution), I improve my ability to do extensive research and consolidate it into a brief presentation, while ensuring that the most important points are retained.
    –> I further improved my ability to be flexible with a changing team structure, since some of my team left the internship at different times. I therefore had to move around groups for deliverables and presentations to accommodate all these changes.
    –> I improved my ability as a leader to maintain engagement from all members of the team, as the internship is coming to an end. It is important that the team stays active, focused and involved in the project, as it is normal for engagement to decrease towards the end of the project. This helps to ensure that everyone finishes the project off in a strong fashion.

Three achievement highlights:

  • I helped some of my team successfully finish the internship and others transition into leadership roles for the next session, which is always such a great accomplishment as a leader!
  • I feel that my team reached a new level of comfort among each other and with me as a leader. This is evidenced by their ease of asking me questions about the deliverables, moving to leadership positions, and asking about soft skills (e.g. how to give presentations, resume building, etc.).
  • I delivered a really informative and comprehensive presentation about resume building and distribution, which I think my team was receptive of and learned a lot from.

List of meetings/training organized including social team events:

  • Organized two team meetings (one of which was attended by mentors to give my team direct access to their expertise, and giving them a chance to ask questions about the deliverables due)
  • Organized a team happy hour
  • Helped organize a BI-wide office hours for all members of both BI teams
  • Attended a joint meeting with the current and new leads to discuss tips, give advice on how to be an effective leader, and look at transitioning from sessions.

Goals for the upcoming week:

  • Introduce the final project to my team, which will consist of analyzing a new data set and producing a set of deliverables, as well as presenting their findings and data to the leads and mentors in the final week. I hope to introduce this project with as much clarity as possible, in a way that the team does not feel stressed about this project, as well as field any of their questions.
  • Prepare and deliver a presentation concerning how to make an eye-catching, professional presentation and public speaking, to help them with their final presentations.
  • Maintain engagement from the team to finish the project strong.
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Week 7 Self-Assessment

Concise overview of things learned:

  • Leadership and Soft Skills:
    –> I continued to learn the importance of empowering my team members, which is especially pertinent in the last week of the internship. I pushed them to take initiative during their final projects and and have a strong finish to their 8-week long learning experience. Through this, I believe that they got a sense of ownership and self-motivation.
    –> This week, I reinforced my knowledge of the importance of problem solving and time management has we (the other BI lead and I) had to organize presentation times with our respective teams, while ensuring that a lead and at least one mentor would be present. We had to ensure to give each team member ample amount of time for final presentations and questions. We ultimately decided to host concurrent presentation times, with individual slots.

Three achievement highlights:

  • I was able to give a very informative presentation concerning best practices on how to make a compelling slide deck and convey effective public speaking skills. I think it was received very well and it will be useful to the team when they are preparing for their final presentations.
  • Introduced the final project and fielded any questions they had concerning deliverables and the final presentation.
  • I believe I was able to maintain excitement and engagement from the team so that they feel confident and ready to complete the final project and finish off the internship on a strong and successful note.

List of meetings/training organized including social team events:

  • Organized two team meetings (one of which was used for our weekly team presentation, as each member presented on the past week’s deliverables and noted similarities and/or differences with their team’s counterpart).
  • Helped organize a BI-wide office hours for all members of both BI teams.
  • Attended one technical training session with all the BI leads (current and upcoming) and the mentors to discuss final presentations and transitioning to the July session.

Goals for the upcoming week:

  • Wrap up the internship in the final week and provide the team with all the support that they may need with delivering final presentations and concluding this internship.
  • Host a collective Happy Hour combining both BI teams together (Bioinformagic and Gene Team) to give everyone a chance to meet their peers and help continue with their networking goals.
  • Give constructive feedback on final presentations, helping to evaluate my team’s work, their presentation deck and public speaking skills.
  • When / if needed, give advice to my team on how to develop their final presentations and create clear, eye-catching and informative slide decks, showcasing their work.
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Final Comprehensive Self-Assessment

Concise overview of things learned:

  • Leadership and Soft Skills:
    –> Throughout this internship, I continued to develop my communication skills. While I had a lot of experience with this in the past, STEM-Away was the first opportunity I had to conduct every aspect of leadership, management, and team-building through a virtual platform. In such, I learned how to effectively organize and hold informative team meetings and team-building happy hour events all virtually. I was able to also create strong and lasting connections with my team members that not only strengthened the relationship of the team but also empowered them to ask questions, feel confident in the deliverables, and have an enjoyable internship.
    –> I also continued to learn the importance of empowering my team members through delegation of tasks. I pushed my team to continue to be creative and ask questions that drove their experimentation and analysis of the datasets. I think this helped them have more of buy-in and self-motivation with this project.
    –> During this internship, I was able to improve my ability as a leader to foster and maintain engagement and motivation from my team and project managers. I recognized the importance of this for an all virtual internship, as no in-person contact made it more difficult to foster a team environment. Towards the end of the internship, I also ensured that everyone stayed focused and actively engaged to finish off the project strong.

  • Technical Skills:
    –> Throughout this internship, I greatly expanded my knowledge of the bioinformatics field, notably how to analyze data sets through data visualization.
    –> I also learned more about microarray data set quality control and normalization methods
    –> Learned more about gene ontology analysis, KEGG pathway analysis, and Wikipathways analysis.
    –> Helped introduce project management and bioinformatics software to my team, including Asana, Slack, GitHub and R.

Three achievement highlights:

  • I was able to help some of my team members transition into leadership roles for the next internship session.
  • I was able to garner excitement and motivation from my team during the entirety of this internship, to help my team deliver strong deliverables and a final project.
  • I was able to successfully teach my team about the fundamentals of bioinformatics, with the help of other leads and mentors. Similarly, I was able to connect my team members to other individuals in our networks, that could help complete their understanding of bioinformatics. Additionally, I was successful in giving informative presentations to my team about soft skills (such as networking and public speaking) that was compelling and helpful.

List of meetings/training organized including social team events:

  • Organized two sessions for final presentations, where each member had to present their final deliverables and self-reflection of the internship as a whole.
  • Organized a BI-wide happy hours for all members of both BI teams. This allowed the teams to meet one another and further help individuals grow their network.

Goals for the upcoming week:

  • Overall, this was a great experience to grow as a leader, build my network, and enhance my technical and soft skills. For the future, I plan on growing my skills as a leader and applying what I have gained from this internship into other aspects of my professional career.

Big thank you to all the members in my team, as they were so wonderful to work with. Thank you as well to my project managers @Isha and @Alex_Cook, for helping me to make everything run smoothly. Finally, thank you to @ddas and @Stephanie for giving me the opportunity to be a part of STEM-Away!