Will Doing A Masters In Bioinformatics Restrict My Career As A Biological Programmer

Question

[m87]

Hi, I have completed my undergrad as a CSE major. I'm very interested to do a masters in Bioinformatics. But by doing so, am I limiting my career path only to biological programmer. If not, what are the areas that bioinformatics can take me to? Thanks

[Alastair Kerr]

Bioinformatics can also be about data analysis. As the field is huge, only an aspect of this may be taught in an MSc. However the real question you should be asking is why you want to take the course. What interests you? You should be wanting to restrict yourself (i.e. have a focus) because you love the subject area. Search for inspiration ( other threads here, blogs, papers etc) and for a feel of what is happening in the field.

Answer 1

[Pawel Szczesny]

There's a distinction on the job market between researcher and programmer. The question is, which one of these you plan to be? The job market for talented programmers is growing (and I'm buying Rao's arguments on developeronomics), although I don't think there's a significantly large market for talented researchers.

More seriously: courses don't limit career options. Lack of talent or social skills do. Bioinformatics from programmers point of view is a field as many others - cool stuff is cutting edge stuff (think big data, network analysis, stochastic modelling and similar). One of my colleagues (bioinformatician) moved to investment fund just after his first postdoc - he was hired for his programming skills in developing computational models.

And finally, have you asked te same question on other forums, preferably more general than this one? Consensus methods are bioinformatics' bread and butter ;).

Answer 2

[Damian Kao]

I think you'll find that the skills you gain from analyzing biological data sets, especially NGS data to be very translational. It is very common for me to find resources related to economic modeling, sociological data, benchmarking networks..etc when searching for information on an analytical method. At the end of the day, we all become data scientists.

Answer 3

[DG]

It all really depends on what you end up doing as a Master's project to be honest. I would hazard that most bioinformaticians tend to come from a background in life sciences instead of computer science, so our career paths may not be as applicable.

[Steve Lianoglou]

Funny -- I would have hazarded the opposite guess :-)

[DG]

Depends on your definition I suppose on the split between computational biologist and bioinformatician. But demographics are shifting as well, at least in my experience I know very few who are computer scientists.

[Ben]

Likewise, and on my masters course there were 2 computer scientists, a statistician, an engineer and around 17 biologists

[Ying W]

I find that more computational biologists come from a cs background while more bioinformaticians come from a biostats/life sciences background

[JC]

I have observe the inverse in the 3 institutes where I have been

[DG]

Different people use the terms Bioinformatician and Computational Biologist in different ways. Some use Bioinformatics to refer to the more CS-side and Comp. Biol. for the Biology side, others the reverse.

Answer 4

[biorepine]

Instead of taking a big step try to join as a intern where they do bioinformatics.

Answer 5

[k.nirmalraman]

I would suggest you take a course of data mining or machine learning where your specialization can be using biological data. This gives you a wide scope for developing methods in bioinformatics and also analyzing data. Plus, it does not restrict you to bioinformatics and you can extend to work in various other fields as well, wherever there is large data.

It depends on the course curriculum that is offered as part of your masters. If the program is clearly offered as Bioinformatics, then may be you are limited to studying only courses in data processing (NGS, array, etc....)... If you take a program in Computational Biology, then you would study a wide range of other things!