I had no prior experience/exposure to DNA sequence analysis and chimera detection, and my only prior exposure to coding in general was a Python class I took in high school, so this was a very confusing experience for me at the beginning (and is honestly still confusing). It was very difficult for me to understand the syntax used in commands and what order to type things in, and I also found it difficult to connect the commands to their outputs in order to interpret the outputs. I also didn’t realize that these tutorials were all connected until about the Mothur tutorial; up until then, I’d been thinking these were all isolated assignments. Of course, learning something like this remotely didn’t help my case either. I found it hard to communicate what was happening on my screen, and troubleshoot through technical errors. Overall, I don’t really think there was anything about this process that was intuitive to me; it really makes me wish there was at least a coding or preferably biocomputing class that was required as a prerequisite for this class because I was so lost. I haven’t really had any eureka moments yet because there’s still a lot that I find myself confused about, so in the end, this doesn’t really make sense to me.
