Hello all,
I graduated with a master's in biomedical informatics from a large state school last year and have a b.s. In biology. Through the degree including research, several personal projects, and independent study I have built my expertise toward a bioinformatics software engineering (SE) focused job.
I realize it is often on a job by job basis but to help my additional efforts, if I am not already experienced enough what general skill levels in different areas would it be helpful for me to be at specifically in SE and math for a bioinformatics tool or research programmer or analyst (more mathematical but can be combined with others) new graduate job? What general percent balance of SE/Math/Bioinf. and other knowledge might be useful?
I'm not asking for one right answer for all jobs but in general just useful advice towards gaining this work. Advice on specific skills and not just general topics is appreciated. I know taking cues from job requirement listings help but your personal opinions help as well!
Thank you for the advice. To be more specific, my thought process is just to find what some of the most popular specific SE and math skills are currently for these jobs. I can appreciate jobs vary in their skills but any way I can optimize my efforts to stay relevant to recurring bioinformatics requirements is appreciated.
The complementary tasks you listed are useful options that can all help accumulate further experience relevant to the work, I have done some of those in the past and found the skills gained to be valuable. I also agree to focus on areas I could use more experience in including programming, math, and statistics but specific details about subareas of the subjects can help me. I'm accepting of any subjective viewpoints, personal experiences, or even educated guesses but some more information I am looking for is opinions on questions such as c/c++ vs c# vs java's more common use for high performance analysis software or if spending more time on javascript frameworks vs server side scripting languages vs Java has more helped with online tool web interface development. An example math question is if bioinf. programmers who are also analysts have found it important to learn deep calculus for data mining or have regression and more typical statistics have usually been enough.
I'm not attempting to take a too utilitarian approach to life but to be balanced about incorporating into my expertise well regarded abilities for the work to try to gain such a job efficiently.