Evolving Bits

Owen McMillan, who we collaborate with on the Natural Diversity extension module to Chado, is teaching an undergraduate class on “Genome Science” this spring. In an interesting variation on the typical class schedule, he decided to intersperse the class with five poster sessions where students create posters presenting a chosen paper. 

In addition to that, Owen invites an outside speaker to those poster sessions to entertain the students, and I had the honor to be the guinea pig for the first session, titled ‘Genomes and Genome Databases’.

The small twist is that the speakers he invited aren’t local faculty colleagues, but instead people from the private sector, possibly to bring a fresh, applied, perspective to the subject, and in terms of showing alternative career possibilities. (You may have the exact statistics, but simple numerics alone suggests that a majority of undergrads will not proceed to faculty careers.)

As I haven’t ever worked at a genome database or sequenced a genome (and at present also don’t work in the private sector), I’m not sure why Owen invited me. Moreover, Owen’s direction was not to say anything about genomes, or genome databases. Instead, he asked me to talk about how I got into the field.

After scratching my head for a long long time, in an epiphany I thought choosing the title of this blog as the guiding motto could be a good idea. Sure enough, once I had that the rest started falling into place, and it ended up being a thoroughly enjoyable experience that I’m glad Owen invited me to. The slides in PPT format are here, though don’t expect much substance if you do take a look.