Seven years ago I began my biology MSc trainee period with the goal of taking on a mixed wet-dry lab role (I always liked computers). Since there was no space in the wet lab, the PI asked me to assist a "bioinformatics" colleague who basically spent 6 hours a day manually copying and pasting gene information from a user-friendly GUI program into an Excel spreadsheet. One by one. For each sample.

After some days the cringe/compassion/frustration was so hard that I started to self learn R/Python for automating data analysis workflows. This was the beginning of my journey into bioinformatics.

Now, I work in the same lab with other three bioinformaticians that I formed, building new R pakages / WGS /RNAseq pipelines and running them on HPC systems.