> Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 16:06:29 -0700 > From: drewschool.org > To: [email protected] > 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 _______________________________________________ BBB mailing list [email protected] http://www.bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bbb
