Four weeks is how long it took me to learn a brand new programming language (r) and use it to perform data analysis and visualization of the results. It’s longer than I expected, but, (or so I comfort myself,) this also means for the past month, I’ve been learning something new every single day, which is super exciting to think about!
First week, a typical day consists of paper reading and messing with the scripts of the model; and once or twice, trying to save my laptop from dying from running the codes with gigabytes of data… but, there’re also discoveries and surprises of what my computer can do and what AMAZING statistical packages R (the super cool language I’ve come to learn about) has. It’s also meeting new people from the group and talk about their projects which are quite divergent—from image processing and identifying cell cycle progression to the study of transcription initiation complex…
Second week, having some understanding about our project, I had the goal in mind to replicate some of the results and visualizations so that I could later use it for my purposes. Error, error, error… There were days I spent in front of my computer just trying to make a single image that can effectively visualize the results, and days trying to figure out how the model works, though I’m still feeling a little “groggy” about the machine learning algorithms. And remarkably, I gradually got used to the extremely flexible schedule and settings of the work in computer science…
Past two weeks, fairly confident about the codes and models, I started a new round of literature searching for transcription factors that are known to bind in a cell-type specific manner. Making sense of the codes, modifying it to run with new data, trouble shooting… is sufficient to summarize my days. I know it sounds tedious, and sometimes it is, but the moments I finally get the codes to work as desired, even it’s little progress, it’s really satisfying.
For the weeks to come, as I will be generating more results and visualizations from the data of various combinations of TF-Cell types, I’m expecting the most exciting part of the project! 🙂
