Hello Bioinformatics lovers,

It is Saturday again. How was your week? Spend some time to reflect what you have learned.

My friend is a great bioinformatician, and he asked for career advice, especially in a competitive job market.

My answer is simple:

1. Do great things
2. Treat people well
3. build your reputation

You will need to first do great things meaning you should work hard to perfect your skills and publish papers.

Take extra steps to help others. Helping others is helping yourself in the long term. People will know your character if you stick to the field for long.

Build your online presence. Make a website for yourself (This is my number 1 advice for all the bioinformatics job seekers).

Nowadays, if people can not find you online, you do not exist. Watch this video on bioinformatics CV tips and this if you want more tips for career development.

If you can do all 3 in a long time. People will seek to work with you. Opportunities will come and knock on your door.

It is simple, but not easy. You need to have a long-term vision of doing the same thing for years.

e.g, I have published over 40 papers in the last 12 years. I have been writing blog posts for over 10 years. I do my best to help others when they have questions about bioinformatics and walk extra-miles when collaborating with my colleagues at work.

It will be the same for this newsletter and my YouTube channel (I started it last April, and now I have over 6700 subscribers). It is small now. Education has always been my passion, my vision is in 10 years the channel will grow to 1M subscribers. The plan?

Doing things consistently by publishing content every week.

Every Wed is my YouTube-making time, and you see it is always later in the night after my kids go to sleep. I have 3 kids! and I am not trying to kill myself :).

I know many of you joined the newsletter seeking technical advice. I made this video this week: How to convert ENSEMBL ID to gene symbol in an RNAseq count matrix. It sounds simple, but there are some places you need to pay attention to.

I am also preparing for a long blog post for understanding and making heatmaps with ChIP-seq data. Stay tuned!

Happy Learning!

Tommy aka, crazyhottommy

PS:

If you want to learn Bioinformatics, there are three ways that I can help:

1. My free YouTube Chatomics channel, make sure you subscribe to it.
2. I have many resources collected on my github here.
3. I have been writing blog posts for over 10 years https://divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/​

Stay awesome!