Advice on what programs to apply to

[ballwera]

I'm looking for programs to apply to this fall and I'm torn between applying for Computational Bio / Bioinformatics or programs with a biology focus. I enjoy doing wet lab biology as well using computational approaches.  I've been working in a genomics lab for the past 2 years doing anything from basic molecular bio (PCR, Westerns, Southerns etc..) to doing NGS analysis (alignments, variant calling, RNA-seq, CNV analysis, Metagenomics etc etc.). Are there any programs/fields that focus on the integration of the two disciplines? 

[Rolling Circles]

You should look for good programs involving bioinformatics.  A lot of schools list this as Genetics, Genomics, and Bioinformatics.

[bsharpe269]

I am in a bioinforamtics masters program currently. It sounds like your interests like up well with bioinformatics programs but I will give a bit of warnings as well:

 

you dont mention whether you plan on applying to phd programs or masters programs. If you plan on applying to masters, then honestly the jobs that you would get after graduation dont care about your wet lab experience and will expect you to be an amazing programmer. This means that while working on your masters, you would need to do very CS/statistics heavy internships/research to be well qualified instead of wet lab stuff.

If you plan on going the phd route (I will be applying to phd programs in the 2nd year of my masters) then still be cautioned that from what I have seen, most students who want to get into bioinformatics are bio students who want to pick up the CS stuff. There seem to be less CS students in the programs because they can just open a cell bio book and learn the bio so they dont feel the need to necesarily do the interdisciplinary program. This means (at least at my school) that 2/3 of the students want to be involved with wet lab stuff and only 2 of the 10ish labs in my program do any sort of wet lab work. If you go the bioinformatics route, you may be able to do wet lab stuff but it is equally or more likely that bio people will do the wet lab work and you will be taking that data and getting information out of it.

 

I am sure that there are very biology heavy bioinformatics programs out there but I dont think that is the norm. If it is really improtant to you that you are involved with wet lab work then I would either look at biology programs or I would look carefully at the research being done in bioinformatics departments and make sure that at least half or so of the labs are doing wet lab work.

 

Edit: Also, it may be worth checking out bioengineering and biophysics departments. I dont know much about bioengineering really but from what I have seen, both of these field tend to be more experiemental than bioinformatics.

Edited April 22, 2014 by bsharpe269

[ballwera]

I am in a bioinforamtics masters program currently. It sounds like your interests like up well with bioinformatics programs but I will give a bit of warnings as well:

 

you dont mention whether you plan on applying to phd programs or masters programs. If you plan on applying to masters, then honestly the jobs that you would get after graduation dont care about your wet lab experience and will expect you to be an amazing programmer. This means that while working on your masters, you would need to do very CS/statistics heavy internships/research to be well qualified instead of wet lab stuff.

If you plan on going the phd route (I will be applying to phd programs in the 2nd year of my masters) then still be cautioned that from what I have seen, most students who want to get into bioinformatics are bio students who want to pick up the CS stuff. There seem to be less CS students in the programs because they can just open a cell bio book and learn the bio so they dont feel the need to necesarily do the interdisciplinary program. This means (at least at my school) that 2/3 of the students want to be involved with wet lab stuff and only 2 of the 10ish labs in my program do any sort of wet lab work. If you go the bioinformatics route, you may be able to do wet lab stuff but it is equally or more likely that bio people will do the wet lab work and you will be taking that data and getting information out of it.

 

I am sure that there are very biology heavy bioinformatics programs out there but I dont think that is the norm. If it is really improtant to you that you are involved with wet lab work then I would either look at biology programs or I would look carefully at the research being done in bioinformatics departments and make sure that at least half or so of the labs are doing wet lab work.

 

Edit: Also, it may be worth checking out bioengineering and biophysics departments. I dont know much about bioengineering really but from what I have seen, both of these field tend to be more experiemental than bioinformatics.

Thanks for the response, I guess it would have helped if I mentioned I'll be applying for PhD programs! I'm interested in a broad range of things both in the lab and on the computer which has made things a bit difficult. I'm really interested in using the data comes from the experiments and then applying them to whatever I'm looking for so I guess it's not the actual experiments themselves I'm really interested in (it's just nice to get my hands dirty every once in awhile). I'd rather design the experiment for someone else to do and analyze the output myself. 

[bsharpe269]

Thanks for the response, I guess it would have helped if I mentioned I'll be applying for PhD programs! I'm interested in a broad range of things both in the lab and on the computer which has made things a bit difficult. I'm really interested in using the data comes from the experiments and then applying them to whatever I'm looking for so I guess it's not the actual experiments themselves I'm really interested in (it's just nice to get my hands dirty every once in awhile). I'd rather design the experiment for someone else to do and analyze the output myself. 

 

Well it sounds like you know what you are looking for which is really great! it sounds like bioinformatics would be right in line with your interests. Since you already have experience doing wet lab stuff and don't seem like you 100% need to be doing it as part of your phd, if you end up in a purely computational lab then you could eventually combine the expirimental skills that you already have with the computational phd knowedge when you are a professor.

 

I personally find the field really interesting and like you, I enjoy both the math/CS/stat stuff and also the biology (though I enjoy reading about bio, not really expirmental work). Bioinformatics programs do a really great job combining these things. For example, when I am writing programs for class, my assignments relate to stuff that I find interesting. A beginnner program for example might invlove writing a script to calculate the CG content of a DNA sequence. My most recent statistics assignment was related to stomach bacteria. I find classes much more interetsing when they relate to important topics like this instead of just generic calculations.

[sqxz]

Every program I applied to this year (see my signature) had some people doing genomics research. Some people were computationalists, while others with experimentalists, and, in most programs, it was said that it was possible for students to do both if they wished (though there are some who advise against it). For your interests, you really can't go wrong with Bioinformatics or Computational Biology programs. Quantitative Biology is another "field" you may want to look into. If you want to be closer to the experiments, it's probably better (in general) to look for programs administered by Biology or other natural science departments, rather than Computer Science departments. Contrary to what bsharpe269 said, I do not think Biophysics programs will be well suited to your interests. The experimentation done in this field is most commonly going to focus on using tools like NMR or X-ray crystallography, and the computation tends to focus on analyzing these data or on physics-based modeling, at least in my experience. Genomics does creep over into biophysics, of course, but it's not central to what biophysics is about.

 

 

I'm looking for programs to apply to this fall and I'm torn between applying for Computational Bio / Bioinformatics or programs with a biology focus. I enjoy doing wet lab biology as well using computational approaches.  I've been working in a genomics lab for the past 2 years doing anything from basic molecular bio (PCR, Westerns, Southerns etc..) to doing NGS analysis (alignments, variant calling, RNA-seq, CNV analysis, Metagenomics etc etc.). Are there any programs/fields that focus on the integration of the two disciplines? 

[elanorci]

It sounds like your interests could fall into programs nominally called things like: Quantitative Biology, Computational Biology, Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics, Biophysics, and probably some other stuff. I would recommend judging which programs you want to apply to based not on the name of the program but on the work being done by faculty within it; titles don't mean a ton. 

 

I was in a similar situation to you: I was interested in moving more toward computational/quantitative things but my major was in traditional biology, as as a lot of my research background. Check out my signature for some of the programs that I applied to. In particular, I could recommend Baylor SCBMB, Princeton QCB, and Harvard Biophysics. It's also totally fine to apply to a mix of "Biology" and more quantitative-sounding programs, which is what I did; programs like MIT/Caltech Biology are so broad that almost anything falls under their purview. 

 

(Note on "Biophysics": there's not really a consistent meaning to this term across schools. At some places, it's things like protein folding, membrane dynamics, NMR, etc, but at other places (like Harvard) it basically just means 'anything quantitative or computational.' Again, I would look at anything that seems even remotely related, and then narrow them down based on what faculty are in the program and what research they're doing. Don't let names put you off.) 

 

Best of luck! You're getting an early start on this, which is great

Edited April 24, 2014 by elanorci