Reading and Researching

Last week, I had two interviews with professors, and both of them were from UT Southwestern. One professor from UT Southwestern teaches bioinformatics, and I had an email interview with him. The other professor teaches biostatistics and I had a virtual interview with her. I learned about what both of them do on a day to day basis, and how they manage their time. One thing I didn’t know about before was the importance and time consumption of writing grants. Writing grants is important because it helps fund a lot of the research that is done at UT Southwestern. Dr. Lee told me about how her time everyday is spent writing grants, teaching students, and conducting research. During this interview, I also learned key differences between biostatistics and bioinformatics. Biostatistics is very specific when it comes to research. It also has to do more with setting up research and experiments, while bioinformatics is a general term for data collection and analysis. This past weekend, I also began researching machine learning and deep learning specifically to understand how it can be used in medical data analysis. This was helpful because it helped me explore possible ideas for my Original Work project. I have another interview this week, on Thursday afternoon. This time, it will be an in person interview at UT Southwestern. Next week, I’ll update how it went!