Does anyone have any advice for a computer science student seriously looking at the field of computational biology as a place for a career? I'd all but forgotten about biology until reading The Diamond Age right before seeing a video of ATP synthase in action [1].
Now, I know stuff like that doesn't have a lot to do with what is done in computational biology, but it did fire the imagination. I'm working my way through Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences - Computer Science and Computational Biology by Dan Gusfield [2], and have implemented (with tests) all of the algorithms encountered thus far in addition to some of the exercises [3]. So far, I really enjoy all the material.
Clearly reading a textbook is not enough to break into a field, but my degree is one in computer science and pure math with an internship in the HPC field. It's getting bit late to throw in a minor in biology or anything like that. However, all of my research-leaning friends in physics and such tell me that what everyone wants is someone who knows how to code, which is certainly something I know well. Is that similar to the situation in computational biology?
Any other advice or knowledge of what it's like to work in the field would also be greatly appreciated :)
[1] http://www.mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk/node/448
[2] http://books.google.ca/books/about/Algorithms_on_Strings_Tre...
[3] https://github.com/ahelwer/IvoryTower/tree/master/ASTS
Now, I know stuff like that doesn't have a lot to do with what is done in computational biology, but it did fire the imagination. I'm working my way through Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences - Computer Science and Computational Biology by Dan Gusfield [2], and have implemented (with tests) all of the algorithms encountered thus far in addition to some of the exercises [3]. So far, I really enjoy all the material.
Clearly reading a textbook is not enough to break into a field, but my degree is one in computer science and pure math with an internship in the HPC field. It's getting bit late to throw in a minor in biology or anything like that. However, all of my research-leaning friends in physics and such tell me that what everyone wants is someone who knows how to code, which is certainly something I know well. Is that similar to the situation in computational biology?
Any other advice or knowledge of what it's like to work in the field would also be greatly appreciated :)
[1] http://www.mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk/node/448
[2] http://books.google.ca/books/about/Algorithms_on_Strings_Tre...
[3] https://github.com/ahelwer/IvoryTower/tree/master/ASTS