This is a good debate/question, Michael. Do you feel that not enough people are taking on bioinformatics?
I actually began as a computer scientist / software engineer in Dublin, Ireland, and I certainly don't regret having studied that first. I still see myself as a computer scientist. I then branched into biology and completed a degree in that, followed by PhD. It was only in my postdoctoral career that I really began to merge both biology and computer science together.
As I look at my colleagues from my computer science course, they each have top jobs and I don't think that any of them did further postgraduate study. As a computer science graduate, I think that top job opportunities come quicker, fortunately for them. As I look at my colleagues from biology, some had to do further training whilst others don't even work in biology anymore.
What I would like is greater integration between computer science, biology, and bioinformatics at the undergrad level, so that those passing through a computer science or biology degree can get a good idea of bioinformatics (and if they'd be interested in it). The only thing that was mentioned in relation to bioinformatics in my computer science course was BLAST, Clustal, etc, as you'd imagine. There was minimal mention, possibly just a few lines on a book page somewhere, in my biology course.
Obviously I'm even left to ponder my own career path, and have contemplated trying to revert back to being a trainee computer scientist. When you get to a certain age, though, no-one listens anymore. One of the main benefits of being a PhD level bioinformatician in research, though, is that the work is interesting and opportunities to move abroad are common. A major worrying aspect of research right now though, is that there are too many highly skilled postdocs, and too few faculty-level posts. Thus, we need to also train the next batch of bioinformaticians to be ready to jump straight into industry when they graduate. This will involve greater cross-talk with industry and academic circles, as already happens for computer science graduates through work-placements and other company-sponsored events.
Kevin
Are you trying to recruit biologists or computer scientists? If I were trying to recruit biologists I would tell them that they never have to do overnight timepoints, nothing dies if they don't come to work at the weekend and the biggest risk to their health is RSI.
while I admit that these are all valid reasons to join the ranks of bioinformaticians, promising biologists that all will be well once they learn how to code is glossing over the tedious stuff that's part of our daily life, too. I've found that different people handle different types of annoyances differently well -- I'm fine with spending time perfecting a regex or hunting for the missing bracket in the code, but I've seen others hating this as much as I hated clipping mouse tails and preparing buffer X for the umpteenth time.
No, that must have been our sysadmin after I took down the server with an excessively parallelized script keeping everything in memory.
"RSI" ?
Repetitive Strain Injury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury
From typing or using a mouse.
One could get RSI using mechanical pipettes (perhaps incorrectly) as well.
Pipetters thumb. It's a real thing. But you'd get that alongside back-pain from sitting at a microscope, cancer from Ethidium bromide, sunburn from the UV lamp and asphyxiation in the LN2 room.
Students are from diverse backgrounds, but a lot are normally lacking background in biology, like in BSc in CS or engineering.
Thanks for all the comments from everyone! your RSI comment was timely unfortunately... hope I can finish the slides anyway.
I've been a biology student till MSc and now entering bioinformatics, so maybe I can shed some light on the topic. I completed MSc in molecular biology last year. Afterwards I joined a project which was pure wet lab where after doing several PCRs, qPCRs, blots etc. for almost 6 months (not to mention the huge amount of time I wasted in preparing chemicals, buffers and standardizing different techniques), I realised that these techniques will never give me a good understanding of the biological system because they provide information for only few genes or proteins. Then a friend introduced me to RNA-seq and I was awestruck by the amount of information it generated and the understanding I developed using that information. I am learning bioinformatics since then and doing very little wet lab nowadays.