Bioinformatics: Reflecting on the Summer Internship

A lot of activities took place during our courses, and a lot of knowledge was passed around during our activities. In my final blog entry I would like to to reflect on the things that I took away from this course on bioinformatics, including how it has and how it will affect me.

Let's start at the beginning of our journey, when the introductory bioinformatics course was being given to well over a hundred people. During this time my colleagues were given the task to take care of our designated groups and it was during this time that I first started to learn about bioinformatics along with everyone else in the auditorium. After the course was finished I was ready to dive right in, and dive we did into Python. This particular language is very good when used as an introductory language because it has a higher percentage of plain word usage along with less special character usage, resulting in code that is easier to write and read. With Python I was able to grasp the mentality required to program effectively. While learning about Python we were divided into teams of two, and during the learning process I picked up plenty of experience in how to deal with all sorts of people and work together in a group.

While mastering Python we saw plenty of other lessons and activities ranging from Scratch, Data Science from Scratch, and learning to use IPython. We made sure not to burn ourselves out by having fun in between by playing team based games such as agar.io, and Counter-Strike. We should also not forget trying to build Genkok in Minecraft.

While our game habits helped us throughout the internship, they could not help us during the hackathon, during which we had to be on full alert all the time, expect when sleeping. I already talked about my thought and feelings on the hackathon in this blog entry. But to reiterate I learned a lot useful information that I look forward to applying in my  future career.

Nearing the end of our internship we quickly looked at different programming languages such as HTML+CSS, then a little d3js, and a little R. We even had a look at Matlab even though we didn't use it. I learned that each language tries to fill in a certain niche, and while most languages can be used for the same purposes some languages are just better and/or faster at some things than other languages. To give an example I will say that a lot of the coding we did on Python took quiet a while to print out a result, and how most codes are ported over to the C++ language due to its extreme speed improvement.

To round up this blog post I would like to talk about the overall environment of the internship for those of you looking to join our ranks the following years. From my point of view the atmosphere of our group was one of the best I have ever encountered, with so much positive energy. Sure there were rough times but nothing that couldn't be handled. All it took was our first week together where we became comfortable with each other to turn the environment into a very chill place full of laughter and fun times. If you are looking for an active summer where you can learn about biology, computers, and coding, give the bioinformatics summer internship a try. Thanks for reading and have a nice summer!