I walked into the West Lab on my first day, not really sure what to expect. Generally, when people think of scientific labs, I imagine they think of people in white coats conducting experiments on cells or mice and mixing chemicals to make groundbreaking discoveries. Or at least this is what I pictured growing up.
This past week I had my first entrée into the world of bioinformatics. I have always thought the field sounded interesting and heard from others how important computational skills would be in research in the future, which is what made me intrigued in taking on the computational biology project proposed to me by Dr. West. However, I wasn’t exactly sure what bioinformaticists do, other than analyzing large data sets and opening doors to whole genome research. So, at first when my secondary mentor David described the first step of my project to me, I was a little disappointed because searching through spreadsheets for genes that are differentially expressed in multiple cell types didn’t seem like a very exciting project. However, my perspective changed throughout the week as I progressed past the first step of the project. I have come to realize that the work I am doing now will allow the wet lab experiments done later to be more effective, due to the background knowledge generated by my computational project. I never pictured lab work as sitting at a computer, comparing maps of genomes, but I am now coming to realizing that I have so much more to learn about working in the field of science.
I have learned that this is what computational biology looks like. This is an example of a section of a genome map that I am analyzing for my project.
I am hoping that throughout the summer, my understanding of lab research will continue to expand, as I hear about the variety of work being done within the West Lab, within the neurobiology department, as well as by the other BSURF participants. As I realized this week, there is so much that I do not know about having a career in science, so I am hoping that this summer I will begin to understand what it means to be a scientist, the motivations of other students doing research and hopefully what I learn will help guide me in what I want to do after college. I am looking forward to all that I will learn this summer, from my work in the West Lab as well as from interactions with people inside and outside of the lab.
