[BiO BB] college

Mike Marchywka marchywka at hotmail.com
Sat May 9 17:08:48 EDT 2009



> Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 16:06:29 -0700
> From: drewschool.org
> To: bbb at bioinformatics.org
> Subject: Re: [BiO BB] college
>
> Hello-
> Thanks for taking the time to write me back. Everyone seems to have a
> different opinion on this. One of my top schools is UC Santa Cruz and
> the professor there differed from your opinions. He said to major in
> bioinformatics from the start. But as Keith said, I might spread myself
> too thin if I do that. I think I should visit so I can see how the
> program is.

I didn't respond earlier but after looking at the Drew site, it
seems to have a liberal arts focus as there didn't appear to be
any technical projects listed. Without
remembering exactly what you were asking, you may want to consider 
a Chemical Engineering program. You probably want to develop
portable problem analysis skills and have basic knowledge
in many fields so you can read the literature in those fields
and become useful as needed. If you can predict the future or 
hope to author a new field ( optimistic but not impossible) you
can specialize in the relevant areas from the beginning. Chemical Engineering
may make some sense but even in Electrical Engineering (my field) you can get appreciable chemistry and physics background along with things like optics or other technical fields.
Computers are an obvious thing with EE but it can be much broader than that.
Check out some engineering curricula they should be online.

You can probably even contact nearby authors and see if they can make
a few comments back to you or you can visit ( obviously you can email
people anywhere if you know what you are looking for ), 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&term=San+Francisco+bioinformatics

If you go get cygwin or some non-windoze stuff you can play around with a lot yourself
right now. I also advocate this approach for much younger kids ( I started with
computers and a chemistry set in junior high and still find the experience
useful- I wish I had source code from an old Z80 computer to use on a cell
phone today LOL ). Find something you like and remember that this is more
than clean, tractable computer stuff done in software- the real underlying
phenomena can be messy and confusing and the computer stuff is just an abstraction
you need to relate back to something relevant. With polymers- from
plastics to proteins to genes- informatics can be pretty good but even there you
have things that the computer currently misses. 


>
> Thanks,
> Eli Draizen


_________________________________________________________________
Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync.
http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_BR_life_in_synch_052009



More information about the BBB mailing list