Do a real machine learning online class or some data analysis online class. Some of the online classes from MOOCs can get you more of a sense of the difference

Do a real machine learning online class or some data analysis online class. Some of the online classes from MOOCs can get you more of a sense of the difference between doing software deployment/statistics for life sciences versus doing it for other categories like market analysis, twitter, or prediction. Also there is Kaggle competitions if you do those well, or sometimes even attempt them and rank decent I think you can qualify for some entry positions by meeting employers interested in such abilities for data analysis. Also promote yourself, instead of just saying you have a github account with x projects, make landing pages with work that is well thought-out/done so people looking for a project can find your page. Flask can make github pages hosted from github repositories for instance. A blog works wonders for recruiting potential from what I've heard.