HackBio: The Baptism of Fire 🔥🔥🔥
Background
My name is Semilogo Sonaike, a biologist from Nigeria. I have a BSc. in Biochemistry, and I am currently undertaking my MSc. in Oncology and Molecular Biology at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
My Path to Biology
My journey to computational biology was anything but straight. Being the child of a medical doctor and growing up with medical books, I was very sure I also wanted to be a medical doctor.
However, I didn’t get admitted to any medical school. So, I picked Biochemistry reluctantly and I fell in love with life at the sub-cellular/molecular level 💓, but my discomfort grew with the seeming “abstractness and inapplicability” of biochemical concepts.
…my discomfort grew with the seeming “abstractness and inapplicability” of biochemical concepts
Along came Programming
Through my uncle, an electrical engineer, I began reading “Introduction to Java Programming” by Daniel Lang. This was a watershed moment in my life.
The ease with which I could locally implement what I read in the book on my computer was life-changing. Biochemistry didn’t offer this ease of implementation. In programming, I found something practicable that I loved.
But the broadness of I.T was disconcerting and I went through different languages for some years, until I picked Python — a language that had a strong biological community. Here, I was most comfortable and that’s how I began basic bioinformatics.
HackBio: The Baptism
I knew I wanted to do HackBio immediately when I saw the ad. But trying hard to focus was slowing down my progress with Python. HackBio was the Baptism of Fire 🔥 I needed. A baptism I will always be thankful to ‘Wale Ogunleye 🙌🏿.
HackBio exponentially accelerated my progress. The internship threw concepts, tools, and ideas at me that I had only heard, but never bothered to learn. HackBio forced me to learn in days what would have taken me months to learn at my own comfortable pace. From Bash scripting, genomic and phylogenomic analysis to Biopython; HackBio, via its amazing community of admins and interns gave me a quick, practical, and solid grounding in these things and more!! Everybody was ready to help 🥺.
Of course, I felt like dropping out at stage 3. I understood nothing about the project at that point. But my Bioinformatics textbook (which I got on the resource channel 😊) and my teammates rescued me. Through this internship, I met amazing and intelligent people. Team Genomics One 🙅🙅
HackBio is that experience. Please, if you haven’t done HackBio, DO IT. A word is enough.
THANK YOU HACKBIO!!
