Friday, March 28, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Nugget
Interdisciplinary study is not a way to avoid hard work and deep understanding of one specific field. In contrast, people who want to be experts in interdisciplinary study need to do a lot more work than others.
I am currently a graduate student at Bioinformatics and Computational Biology program. Every year our program recruits around 10 students from hundreds of applicants all over the world. After the first two-year training, no matter what your college background is, one is supposed to stand at the graduate level of computer science, biology, and statistics, and be able to talk about any of them with sufficient understanding.
This is hard, challenging, and perhaps having increasing need in future. Bioinformatics here only serves as an example.
When I worked with biologists on statistical analysis, though I have had several graduate level biology courses, I still need to sit down and ask some questions about biology. Sometimes I would wonder what if I do not know so much biology as well as computer science. What if I am only a statistics person, would I be able to do as much as I can do now? Would I be able to collabrate with people and communicate with them efficiently? Would I be able to read math biology papers and computational biology papers with ease? I think the answers to all of them are no.
In our program, not many of professors are well rounded in all these three fields. And it is very hard to find qualified TAs to correct homeworks since this field has just started.
I am currently a graduate student at Bioinformatics and Computational Biology program. Every year our program recruits around 10 students from hundreds of applicants all over the world. After the first two-year training, no matter what your college background is, one is supposed to stand at the graduate level of computer science, biology, and statistics, and be able to talk about any of them with sufficient understanding.
This is hard, challenging, and perhaps having increasing need in future. Bioinformatics here only serves as an example.
When I worked with biologists on statistical analysis, though I have had several graduate level biology courses, I still need to sit down and ask some questions about biology. Sometimes I would wonder what if I do not know so much biology as well as computer science. What if I am only a statistics person, would I be able to do as much as I can do now? Would I be able to collabrate with people and communicate with them efficiently? Would I be able to read math biology papers and computational biology papers with ease? I think the answers to all of them are no.
In our program, not many of professors are well rounded in all these three fields. And it is very hard to find qualified TAs to correct homeworks since this field has just started.
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