Entering edit mode
6.1 years ago
ishackm
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110
Hello Everyone.
I hope you all good.
Currently I am learning R and Python with books in Bioinformatics and I am going to do a two day course on Python at my local university. I would like to know please if I do a Bioinformatics project at home, can I put that on my CV as its very hard to get a job without experience?
Many Thanks,
Ishack
If you have a free time for couple of months, i recommend you to do an internship in a bioinformatics group. So you can spend your whole day in group with a lot of bioinformatician. Getting practical experience is as important as theoretical knowledge.
This is the best advice you can get. The group I work in for example tends to accept students that ask for this kind of short-term partnerships (I work in Vienna, Austria, if that's convenient for you :D).
Yes, Vienna is repeatedly voted one of the best cities in the World in which to live.
Hey Macspider, thanks very much for the invaluable advice. Does your group accept a remote working student as I live in London?☺
I don't think so! I'm a mere PhD student, I don't really know the policy that my boss has. But I can definitely tell you that being physically in the same place makes a big difference, in learning how to do stuff.
http://seq.boku.ac.at/foswiki/bin/view/Home/OpenPositions
Consider putting your code/workflow/results up on GitHub/public site so that potential employers can take a look at your work. Many a times people want to know what you actually know rather than what you put in a resume. Be honest about acknowledging ideas/code borrowed from other sources. You have not said what kind of background you have (other than the courses listed above) as that would count towards your overall profile as a job candidate.
hello, thank you for the reply,
I am a Biomedical Scientist, looking to do go into the Bioinformatics sector. I hope to do a Master's in Bioinformatics, but at the same time I would like to earn some work experience, in anyway possible.
if I do a personal project, can I put my code on Github and therefore put that on my CV?
Yes for the question.
As others have said below see if you can volunteer/work with some group locally. That may allow you to decide if you want to continue doing bioinformatics as your day job. People sometimes fail to appreciate that a lot of what a bioinformatician may do is plain/tedious/uninteresting work (e.g. data wrangling). That may get old for some quickly.
Yes, indeed. I remember, when I was less experienced, how I used to dislike those steps and would always race toward the fun part. I have now come to appreciate and enjoy the data cleaning/wrangling aspects, though. It's satisfying when you transform a noisy raw data set into something from which unbiased statistical inferences can be made - this was drilled into my mindset in Boston.
well, you can do online courses (e.g. www.coursera.org) and exercises or do an internship in some computational laboratory/company.
You can have a look at http://rosalind.info/problems/locations/ to train your Python and bioinformatics skills. Maybe your local university teachers know someone who needs an internship or help with a project.