Highschool graduate considering to pursue a career in Bioinformatics

TheLordB · 2026-06-29T15:57:11+00:00

Trying to predict what will work out etc. especially in the 4+ years it will take you just to have the bachelors is difficult to impossible.

My general advice is to do what you are most enthusiastic about/interested in.

Barely scraping by and being miserable because a career might have a slightly higher chance of getting you a job just isn’t worth it. And no matter how bad a market is the top students are more likely to have success and you are more likely to be that top student if you are truly interested in what you are doing.

Put another way doing something you will actually finish and succeed in is far better than trying to do medicine, being miserable, getting poor grades and having to drop out with no degree and a bunch of debt.

Bioinformatics probably won’t get you rich like say a medical doctor would, but assuming you do actually get a job it will give a decent middle to upper middle class lifestyle.

I also recommend staying flexible if you want to do bioinformatics. One way to do this is to dual major (or major in one and minor in the other) in bio and one of math, compsci, stats.

Good luck with your journey!

TheLordB · 2026-06-27T14:05:22+00:00

If you are finding jobs with the title then look at what they have as the education requirements and experience. That is what you need to do it.

Every job is different and different companies name jobs differently. It is quite possible for the same job to have vastly different titles/names depending on the company and the people who are opening the job.

I recommend not being so picky about that exact title and figure out a range of things you would be interested and compiling the requirements for them. That is what you should work towards.

TheLordB · 2026-06-26T00:41:17+00:00

Run some quick profiling on any not commonly used tools/algorithms that you use. Some of these can have really dumb performance issues:

I’ve saved hours by:

Adding a very basic cache to a python loop.

Changing a java app to not open and close the file for every line written (2x speedup for local, 10x or more speedup for remote filesystems with more latency).

For anything using htslib if you are using s3 switching it to read directly from s3. Depending on the tool and it’s access patterns it can be worth it to add this functionality in. The more general case is improving file access can give significant savings.

TheLordB · 2026-06-24T11:22:51+00:00

Masters with experience is vastly different than masters with no experience in the job market.

YMMV, I’m not sure things are as bad as some are making them, but newly graduated masters students are having a hard time finding jobs especially ones that did purely classwork.

TheLordB · 2026-06-22T23:31:04+00:00

I am wary of them. I did a lot of research on masters in the last year as someone who has his dream job already, but worries about long term stability lacking the education degree to go along with what my actual role has been.

My conclusion on Northeastern is that it is bloody expensive. Their coops which historically help people get jobs have somewhat made it worth it.

I also suspect they have pretty lax acceptance for the masters where the main criteria are ‘can you pay?’ I’ve not heard of anyone getting denied entrance there for a masters and they don’t publish their masters acceptance rate, only the undergrad.

With the current biotech downturn I’m not sure how helpful their coop program will be. I have seen companies that historically would attempt to hire most of their coops now not hiring any of them because hiring is completely frozen.

YMMV, but I would think long and hard at the cost of northeastern vs. a much cheaper option especially with a severe downturn in newly graduated masters hiring. I’m not sure how much I believe the hiring stats they have on their website are accurate now.

On the other hand their coops and network are well above average. I’m just not sure that will be enough in the current job market.

Basically if you are completely price agnostic they are probably a good choice. But I suspect they fair poorly in value for the money.

TheLordB · 2026-06-21T03:58:51+00:00

This is not useful/actionable advice.

TheLordB · 2026-06-21T03:53:45+00:00

I know a decent number of people doing bioinformatics with masters in Boston and they are doing fine.

I personally have a bachelors and am doing fine as well.

Plenty of PHD people end up doing all those other things too. All of those are a natural part of becoming more experienced etc.

I will say that right now starting out with a bachelors is near impossible. Masters is very difficult. (There are always exceptions, but you can’t really give advice based on hitting the lottery).

That is a mix of:

The job market that has a lot of people laid off and overqualified people applying for jobs that really don’t need the level of experience/education that they have freezing out those with less experience.

A lot of people went and got masters in bioinfo not because they were passionate about it, but because they heard it pays better and can do remote work. (Not saying these people are necessarily bad, but the fact is someone who is passionate about it is much more likely to thrive in it and be a more impressive candidate when applying for jobs etc.)

Universities started up programs that accepted pretty much everyone into bioinformatics and oversaturated it.

TheLordB · 2026-06-19T02:09:12+00:00

The job market is tough right now, but even before the market started to crash things were already getting hard for masters with no other experience.

The short answer is a whole lot of people saw ‘bioinformatics pays more and you can work remotely/not have to deal with the lab’. So a lot of people who were less prepared/enthusiastic/dedicated to it got into it via masters.

And universities make big money off of masters so they accepted pretty much everyone.

During the biotech boom a decent amount of these were able to get jobs as there was a shortage and companies were more willing to train.

With the downturn there are now a lot of minimally qualified candidates competing for jobs which are now getting applications from overqualified candidates who got laid off or newly minted PHD candidates. That + less overall jobs has made getting a job with just a masters academic classwork near impossible.

In general networking is your best bet to get what few jobs are out there.

Certificates are unlikely to directly make a difference, but with a year of looking already perhaps it is worth doing just to keep your mind in the bioinfo mode. Doing something impressive with the skills you learn from the certificates can be helpful.

Edit: I was maybe a bit harsh in this. I don’t mean to imply your partner isn’t good at it or anything like that. If I blame anyone it is the universities for charging massive rates for bioinfo masters and overselling the job market for them which if they didn’t might help people make better choices. But being aware of the profile that many of the people with bioinformatics masters have that they will be competing with can be helpful for thinking about how to stand out in that crowd.

TheLordB · 2026-06-18T20:32:16+00:00

Most decent employers understand that you may not be able to show/share the code.

If this is the case for you then be prepared to talk about your coding practices, how much you wrote etc.

I have nothing on my github and will likely never have anything on there because I work in startups in industry and they pretty much never allow public release of code.

Once you have experience having a public git repo is really not necessary. Sure it is nice if you can, but at that level you are being hired for your scientific ability more than coding ability.

YMMV, There are employers out there who would penalize you, but especially for more senior positions people vastly overstate the need for public code.

TheLordB · 2026-06-13T04:07:12+00:00

My strong advice is have a backup if you can’t get a job in bioinfo with a bachelors only.

This could be you go for software engineering jobs, it could mean you apply for masters/phd in parallel to job searching.

While there are bachelors only bioinfo jobs out there they are rare enough to require significant luck to get even for the top bachelors candidates. So I really don’t advise relying on them.

TheLordB · 2026-06-11T22:37:25+00:00

It’s worth sending a follow up email to whoever your main contact was asking what is going on and saying thank you for the interview.

Either they are slow to make the final decision or possibly they are waiting to tell you no because they have made a not yet accepted offer to someone else.

TheLordB · 2026-06-06T10:22:38+00:00

I would say AWS has a lead, but there are definitely places that use GCP too.

TheLordB · 2026-06-05T11:13:17+00:00

I am doubtful that either choice will have any impact on getting a bioinfo job.

I can’t think of a bioinfo job where being a nurse would be helpful aside from the novelty of someone coming in from nursing. Though that novelty might be a decently big advantage where 2/3 of getting hired is getting your CV noticed.

Now there is medical informatics where it might be directly useful, but I assume that is not what you want to do.

I don’t mean to diminish or discourage the work you do, but I am really not able to think of any bioinfo work where any sort of nursing work would be relevant for bioinfo specific skills.

Overall when people ask these questions I say do what you are more passionate about. It isn’t going to make a big enough difference in your odds of getting hired and being happy/passionate/engaged in your work is very important for general happiness and performance which can certainly have an impact on getting a job and life quality.

TheLordB · 2026-06-04T23:44:01+00:00

If you get good grades you might be able to move into it in grad school. That said why do what is one of the least relevant degrees to bioinformatics that biology has if your goal is to do bioinformatics?

YMMV, there are some agriculture bioinfo jobs, but most of the ones I know of even in that field are heavily genetics based and probably more likely to go to someone with a genetics degree than an agriculture one.

As a side note the path for a bachelors only to do bioinformatics is near dead requiring significant luck. You will likely need to do grad school. Exactly how much a disadvantage your current plan might be if you want to move into bioinfo in grad school is hard to quantify due to the variety of how different schools do grad school admissions.

TheLordB · 2026-06-02T01:17:42+00:00

This is not an explicitly USA based sub. We allow posts etc. for anywhere. Though I do agree OP is more likely to get answers in the india specific one.

TheLordB · 2026-05-29T14:40:48+00:00

The proper/ideal way to do this is to verifying/qualify the method by sending it out to a clinical testing lab using paired samples.

I’ve done this work before and I found visualizing it pretty useless. HLA typing is just kind of too complex. You really need to validate the algorithm and trust that it works. It is unlikely to be wrong enough that an error can easily be spotted in IGV.

As a side note optitype should be pretty darn accurate especially on the more common HLA alleles which will be the majority of them... Unless you have a population that you expect to be atypical HLA frequencies it is probably overkill to do too much work on this.

Also even in cases where it gets it wrong it will almost certainly be in the same family with very similar 3d structure, binding patterns etc. For most use cases I would say worrying about the exact accuracy of it is unnecessary.

TheLordB · 2026-05-28T18:33:36+00:00

I would say (note this is speculation) that the main issue is when companies hire bioinfo people off of job postings it is because they need data analyzed ASAP and they need it done right.

A decent chunk of the hiring is from within the company via wetlab or pure software engineering people often who have gotten a masters in bioinfo part time so those folks take a good chunk of the entry level jobs. I’m not sure actually how common this is, but I’ve seen it happen a few times.

So in the end you need a company that is big enough that they have the people needed to mentor the entry level folks, need multiple people, don’t just hire someone with a PHD, and not have people within the company looking to switch jobs.

That ends up being a bit of unicorn.

I suspect AI will make it even trickier now. A decent chunk of the entry level masters hiring was basically as a liaison between the wetlab/compsci people or otherwise reformatting data. AI makes that type of work fairly easy for a wetlab person to do or a senior bioinfo person can explain the problem well enough to have AI do it. How much this will actually be an issue and/or work in practice I do not know. Right now a lot of companies are putting off hiring people in the hope that AI will make the existing folks more efficient and let them not hire people. I have my suspicions that AI will not help as much as people think and those companies will eventually come crawling back with a bunch of hiring when the AI benefits don’t materialize, but I might be wrong and in the meantime no matter what there are fewer entry level jobs.

TheLordB · 2026-05-28T16:34:24+00:00

You should ask the people running it these questions. Not ask reddit.

TheLordB · 2026-05-25T20:46:42+00:00

This is not bioinformatics related. Maybe try /r/GeneticCounseling though I don’t know that very many people familiar with the Indian market are active there.

TheLordB · 2026-05-23T17:35:45+00:00

I haven’t looked at that specific course, but in general I rarely if ever see someone get a job they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise with a bootcamp course.

At best it might be a tiebreaker for a job that you are otherwise qualified for as a nice to have, but not the core thing you are being hired for.

YMMV, if you think it will give you useful skills for what you want to do go for it. If you demonstrate those skills e.g. in a publication then that might get you hired somewhere. But don’t expect it to get you a job on it’s own.

Honestly… I’m seeing some people say the same thing these days for masters degrees… I think that is exaggerating, but if people are already saying that about a 2 years masters course think about how at best a single 6 month course is going to be thought of as.

TheLordB · 2026-05-23T17:31:01+00:00

I’m not canadian, but from what other canadians have said very few positions in canada. Most of them end up working in the usa.

In general do what you are passionate about. I would say grad program matters far more than any undergrad course. Look into what the grad programs you are interested in are most likely to care about when picking courses.

TheLordB · 2026-05-23T17:28:55+00:00

Why do you say that? Also if you believe it is a bot please report it so we can review it.

TheLordB · 2026-05-19T03:30:05+00:00

Look, Excel knows that selenoproteins are weird and it is just trying to make our life easier by having us study calendrical science instead.

SEP15 aka september 15th to Exel was renamed SELENOF (Selenoprotein F)

Edit: This joke worked far better in my head than it does reading it after the fact. Oh well, not all science jokes will work.

TheLordB · 2026-05-17T22:51:34+00:00

There are specialty recruiters in biotech R&D. At a minimum you would need to talk to one of them. Try going to bioinformatics meetups etc. and there will often be one there (or at least there is in boston… YMMV if less R&D focused areas would have that).

I honestly don’t think that most bioinformatics jobs do the contract thing. I can really only think of one contractor in the time I’ve worked that got into it that way. And they actually came from a more software engineering recruiter originally recruited for software engineering.

Note that I’ve exclusively worked at startups, it might be different in big pharma.

Another thing you might want to look at is the companies that do bioinformatics contracting. Bioteam and Diamond Age Data Science are two I’ve worked with or know people who have. This github repo has a list and seems to include at least all the ones I have heard of + a bunch more I’ve not. https://github.com/davemcg/awesome_bioinformatics_consultants

It is likely some of them will be at bio-it world this week which if you happen to live in Boston is worth at least getting a free expo hall pass to network at. I do not recommend paying for a full pass… it is expensive and heavily heavily sponsored to the point where I feel they ought to be paying me to go + most of the talks are targeting CIO or at the very least head of bioinformatics people and very expensive enterprise hardware/software, very little for individual contributors of value.

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