Dreams of Research

Three years ago, in a single week, I co-founded the Melbourne University Biological Society and got a job working as a research assistant in a protein engineering lab via CSIRO’s UROP program. I remember feeling like everything was coming together and that I was finally on the path to becoming a researcher.

A 2nd year Bachelor’s of Science student, I was still enacting a plan that I had formulated in late high school. The plan was:

• Complete an undergraduate degree in biochemistry.
• Complete an honours year in a lab with a supportive supervisor.
• Start a PhD and work hard to find insights that might one day save lives.

At the time, I knew a lot of people with that plan. Many of those providing me with advice up until this point thought that someday I would indeed be a scientist. I’d always loved biology, and I was probably smart enough to make it a career, if I worked hard.

Life Sciences’ Research is Awesome…

Working part-time during semester and full time during the holidays, I loved being part of a lab. One week we’d be reading papers and formulating a plan to test a hypothesis and another we’d be problem-solving biochemical workflows.

I’m not sure how much I was contributing, but I was learning lots and I’m grateful to this day for the PhD, honours students, Postdoc and my supervisor for the time they invested in me.

However, it was soon obvious that my skill set wasn’t enough. It seemed like if I wanted to have a secure career, I needed to learn the computational side of life sciences research. This notion was based on discussions about how experimental research couldn’t compete if it wasn’t backed by computational biology or bioinformatics.

With the encouragement of my supervisor, I decided to switch from a biochemistry major to the brand new computational biology major. I’d never hated math and I could see that computational biology greatly depended on it.

#careers #mass-spectrometry #data-science #startup #biology #data analysis