And hard skills are (relatively) easy.
I read this post in Bioinformatic Zen that discussed the development of "hard skills" (programming and other stuff) and "soft skills" (dealing with failure, self-discipline, etc). It is a very interesting post and I really couldn't agree more with it.
In my experience, the "bio" part is much more difficult that the "informatics" part for us bioinformaticians, even for people who came from a biology background. Things that can be measured and dealt with a logic way are relatively much easier, such as learning a programming language or developing a software package. For things that cannot be dealt with a pure logic fashion, such as what constitutes an interesting and important project or what does one do when a paper is rejected, no one can really teach you and you just have to bang your head against the wall until you somehow magically learn the lesson (if ever).
2 comments:
The most difficult thing for me was learning to be independent and not expect too many answers from my colleagues or boss - the reason being that there aren't any and you have to come up with them yourself. I still learning this now.
I am struggling with writing my dissertation now so I totally understand what you mean. Basically it's like: okay, I discovered something new and potentially interesting now, how am I going to explain it and put everything together?
Because it's new, no one really knows what that means, including all my friends and advisers. Unfortunately (or fortunately), it is MY job to write this up.
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