The Rachel Sullivan

Main Points

• Educational Background
• How I got to this point
• Where I am going/intend to go

Abstract

I graduated in 2020 from University of South Florida with a Bachelor’s in Cell and Molecular Biology. In 2023 I obtained my masters of science in medical science from USF. After graduating, I was reading some books on success and deep work, I came across the point that to be useful in today’s knowledge world, one must be technologically inclined. As a person that would not identify themselves as technologically inclined, I have challenged myself to become that.

In addition, I am fortunate that my background in molecular biology has produced large sums of data to be analyzed in the recent ~20 years. To continue in this field, I have to become comfortable with computing and data analysis.

My journey into this will be detailed in this blog. I would like to showcase how I got there, as someone with very little background in computers, the challenges I run into along the way, and eventually use this as a portfolio for my work. Enjoy!

Educational Background

Hello! We are going to start at the very beginning with undergrad. Before I was at USF I was at community colleges. I just completed pre-reqs for medical school – organic chemistry, biologies, physics, calculus, etc. and that was all fine and good. When I applied for USF I was asked to pick a concentration for my biology degree, I looked through the list and molecular bio looked the most interesting at the time.

Following with wanting to go to medical school, I also looked into joining a research lab and followed some general guidance on the school website as to how to do this. I cold emailed some PIs in different departments, and got a response from a lab at the Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute, and that one of the post-docs needed a lab volunteer. So I joined the lab.

The work at this lab consisted of basic molecular biology lab work – making solutions, running Western Blots, Immunohistochemistry, protein purification, tissue sampling, etc. One day, the PI mentioned they were moving universities out of state, so I looked into lab volunteer opportunities at Moffitt Cancer Center.

Here, I joined forces with one of the graduate students and we worked on doing more advanced molecular biology techniques such as PCRs, cell culture, transfections, transformations, to study the characterization of a protein in vivo and in vitro. It was fast-paced and fun time. This was also at the beginning of 2020, and soon it was March 2020 and the labs had restrictions on personnel and social distancing, essentially I could no longer volunteer.

I graduate in August of 2020 with a Bachelor’s of Science in Cell and Molecular Biology. I found a job doing translational surgical research in a rat model. During this job I applied for medical school cycle and did not hear many responses. In January, I cut my losses on going to medical school and looked into graduate/masters programs and found one at USF. The program was designed that students take the first year medical school classes at USF COM with the medical students. We participated in the anatomy labs, practicals, took the same tests, NBME exams at the end of each course, it was intensive. We took classes in musculoskeletal, molecular biology, cardiovascular/respiratory system, GI/endocrine/renal, and neuroscience.

How I got to Now

I graduated from the master’s program in May 2023, with a Masters of Science in Medical Science. Soon after I found a job as a research coordinator at the same hospital system I was involved with for the surgical research.

I still had a strong desire for knowledge and to build more of a skillset applicable to the real world. During time I was reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. In it, he suggests that to be useful as a knowledge worker in the job force today and in the future, one should be technologically competent. I recognized that I would identify myself as technologically incompetent. Not by choice, I just never had much exposure or need to learn to work with computers. I learned wet-lab bench research skills instead – Western Blot, pipetting, etc. I remember hearing about biostatistics or bioinformatics briefly when I was in school, but never really looked into it. I dug further into different job fields, other PhD programs, bioinformatics, etc, anything. There was a lot of Googling involved. During this time, AI and Machine Learning were really starting to kick off, with ChatGPT getting big in early 2023, and reading books such as AI Revolution in Healthcare by Peter Lee.

One of the researchers at the hospital system I worked at was going to be sending C. elegans to space to study their metabolism, and she was possibly in need of someone to do some data analysis for her. This conversation set me on a path of looking into bioinformatics at USF. I was also hearing a lot about data analyst jobs in general during this time. I saw there was a master’s program but I was more interested in pursuing a PhD program if I were to go back to school at this point. The director of this program suggested I look into bioinformatics department at Moffitt. Through looking through these pages at Moffitt and faculty, I landed on the Machine Learning Department page. I paged through some of the faculty there and read some of their lab page websites, some of their papers, etc

My next few thoughts involved, wow, I know nothing about computers, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, nothing about this field. I became aware there may be a huge learning curve getting up to speed in a field where I had no experience. Kids in elementary and high school were probably coding these days, or people had formal training in it. Daunting. I started looking at Coursera courses, on Machine Learning with Python, which was part of a larger AI engineering program.

During this time, I reached out to more people in the field and had some more conversations. This helped me define a little more where I may want to go, how I was going to get there, etc.

One person I had a meeting with had a molecular biology background similar to mine, and then got into data science field. One person had a physics and data analyst background that was more on the business side of things. One person has a chemistry background, then got into machine learning field and does work in Oncology field.

I have molecular biology, physiology, and then want to get into the data science field. There is a lot of biological data being generated everyday, and lots that has already been made and available now to be mined and see other sides.

That is very vague, but that is where I’m at at the moment. I think It is best I let my learning take me where I go.

Where I’m going

So, at this very moment. I am working on giving myself a crash course in all things coding, and setting things up on my computer to code for scientific applications.

Specifically, I have been doing the Bootcamp for GeneLab that was recorded from 2021. I have been recommended a bootcamp from Udemy. There is a lot of information out there, and what I’ve found is it is hard to find concrete, step-by-step, how to even start in this field, I feel like there is an assumption of some background in coding/computer science and I just don’t have that (at the moment).

I’ve downloaded Anaconda platform, I’ve clicked through some JupyterNotebook. I am seeing that, I have to download some packages. I can do all of these things, I don’t quite grasp why or how these things work at the moment. I’m sure there is an explanation somewhere but at the moment it, even the words don’t quite mean a lot if that makes sense. Like I could be given the explanation of how or why something works but I have no context for the words.

Moving Forward/Next Steps

So this post will serve as the general backdrop of my background and where my head is at currently. A lot of where I take this in/direction will change so I’ll save it for the next post.