The recent coding exercises that we have been doing in class have been an interesting experience. In the past, I have really struggled with coding, and it is not something that I have any knowledge of or care to learn. With that in mind, this class experience has both been extremely challenging and a huge learning experience throughout the past weeks. I have added almost everything we have done to my knowledge base. I had no clue that this is how you processed genetic data, and it was quite surprising to see how code intensive it is.
My advice for other students would be to take it really slow, and follow the tutorials to a T. Don’t cut corners and just paste the code. Although it’s way more frustrating and time consuming, typing out all of the command lines cements the ideas into your brain, and you’ll actually learn what you’re doing. I will say that almost none of this was intuitive for me, the whole time I feel like I am trying to decipher hieroglyphics, as I have no base understanding for coding, so all of the terms were super foreign to me. Definitely the most difficult is understanding the directories and connections. I get super confused, and although I now know how to create directories and navigate them, the concept of how they connect to OSU and how you really access them is really hard for me to understand.
I did have some eureka moments, like when I was trying to run the mothur program over and over, and it finally gave me no errors back. I felt so relieved that I was able to get it to work. In the end, I now have a basic grasp of the coding process for processing the data, but without a tutorial I would instantly get stuck. I am glad that I had the opportunity to try this though, because it shows me that this is not something that I would like to do for my job. That being said, I understand its importance to this class. The software is a great tool to analyze genetic code on a large scale, and allows us as researchers to make informed decisions about the sequence based on the data retrieved.
