I joined STEM-Away’s online internship in June as an observer, with a strong background in medicine and biology, and almost no experience in R and data analysis. My aim was to develop a greater understanding of the growing field of Bioinformatics, through immersion and working on a hands-on project. Simultaneously, I also hoped to interact with many students from diverse backgrounds and draw inspiration from the experienced mentors.
My main take-aways:
Technical:
Strategies for dissecting salient aspects of a scientific paper, and the utility of figures in conveying the information.
Beginner-level understanding of the BioConductor and related packages in R Studio, concepts of Differential Gene Expression and Gene Ontology, the stepwise pipelines available to perform pre-processing, Quality control, Normalization and analysis of both kinds of data.
Improved my ability to code in R, and Python.
Improved ease while working with platforms GSuite, STEM-Away, LinkedIn, Slack, Asana and GitHub.
Soft Skills:
Actively participated in all Training sessions, Gene team meetings and group meetings. Tried to ask relevant questions, and contributed to group presentations.
Began working on networking on the LinkedIn Platform.
Learned the importance of formatting my Resume, making a good elevator pitch, maintaining positive body language, and cultivating cultural competence.
Final thoughts:
Training sessions were extremely useful to get me up to speed with the background knowledge and skills needed for the various tasks.
The work was well organized over many weeks, with periodic deliverables and reminders.
Unfortunately due to the lockdown, many other responsibilities encroached on my time. This impacted my performance during this internship.
Nevertheless, I am very thankful to everyone at STEM-Away, the organizers and leads who put together this online program, and thus facilitated me to gain valuable Bioinformatics experience during these troubled times.