Yvesgaetan - Bioinformatics Pathway

Final Comprehensive Self-Assessment

Concise overview of things learned:

  • Leadership and Soft Skills:
    Before this internship I had many questions about my leadership and management abilities. Throughout this internship I focused on those two elements and worked on them. I leaned how to work with a very diverse and intentional group, how to organise and hold informative team meetings and I alse learned a lot on team-building. Thanks to the R trainings I’ve hosted, I worked on my topic exposition, on how to be deal with people with different background and how to make them feel confident. It wasn’t easy since most of the time I felt like I was literally talking alone, but after a while I’ve learned how to interact with the other intern during my webinars.
    –> As a Project Lead I’ve learned the importance of team working, the importance of empowering my team members and pull out their best qualities. I also helped them as much as a can and try to convey them all my love for Bioinformatics and R.
  • Technical Skills:
    –> Even though I had experiences in the Bioinformatics field, I expanded my knowledge and solidified what I had learned in the past.
    –> Throughout this internship, I had the opportunity to improve my R skills, and I had the opportunity to share this achievements with the rest of the participants
    –> 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.

Three achievement highlights:

  • At the beginning of the internship many participants had few/none experiences with R. I was a great pleasure to see that by the end of the internship they were autonomous with this tool and they could perform some analysis by their own.
  • I was able to successfully host different webinars (R trainings and R Office Hours).
  • I was able to 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.

A Huge thank you to all members in my team, for the great work and for all the wonderful moments. A special thank you to my colleagues project lead and project manager @Isha and @Alex_Cook, for all the energy they put in other to make this experience perfect! Last but not least, a huge thank you to @ddas and @Stephanie for giving the opportunity to share my love for Bioinformatics and R and for giving me the opportunity to be a part of STEM-Away!