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What are the areas of research that need CS people and how would a grumpy CS/engineering MS/PhD make the switch? Um, asking for a friend! As an undergraduate I
by tomkat0789 5y ago
What are the areas of research that need CS people and how would a grumpy CS/engineering MS/PhD make the switch? Um, asking for a friend!
As an undergraduate I actually first got into computing through a biology-computational project! My current work pays the bills, but my armchair dream switch to research - in biology or another science.
- Balgair 5y agoChiming in as a former neuro-y person: Really, it's the bare basics that they need a big hand with. In bio, a lot of the grad students have literally no calculus or math training outside of stats. They have no training whatsoever in CS, let alone programming. If they are programming, it's matlab, and then they use 15+ nested for-loops (true story). Hardcoded is the only way of things. Github is a way around gmail's 25mb limit. The PIs are these people with a few years under their belts and even worse habits. It's all hacked together with bubblegum and if-statements. And the time/money pressure is intense. They don't have the resources to start fresh with new habits or to learn three semesters of math. I don't really know where to start on helping them, but it's pretty far back in the the chain. Honestly, given the constraints, it feels like they need someone to write programs for them in a pair coding style for free.