How I decided to become a biologist
I thought about changing the field of activity around the eighth year of my IT career. During this time, I managed to be an Android, iOS, Ruby developer and manager, both in my homeland and abroad. I will not go into the details of searching for myself, I can only say that biology was interesting to me from school (not least because of young and pretty teachers!). As a result, I entered the magistracy of Ghent University (Gent University) with a degree in Bioinformatics: Systems Biology.
Biology and bioinformatics deserve a separate article. Briefly, since the first sequenced human genome (2001), biology cannot be imagined without analyzing a large amount of data. For example, evolutionary biology cannot be imagined without a computational analysis of protein and genomic sequences for a common ancestor. In medicine, an analysis of the patient’s genetic data is used to find the optimal treatment strategy for cancer. All this requires infrastructure to store and process big data. The ball is still ruled by biologists who additionally studied bioinformatics. This creates a number of problems with writing quality software. Therefore, people with development experience are welcome, although a deep knowledge of biology is still key.
Why Ghent
Ghent is rainy but cozy in its own way
I got the impression that few people had heard of Ghent outside Belgium, at least among my colleagues at my previous job. Anyway, for 5 years of my life in Germany I have not met a single Belgian, unlike the Poles, French, Italians and immigrants from the former USSR. Ghent is a rather small city, and it was not the first on my list when I chose a place of study. However, several factors played a role:
- Cost of education. I am not a citizen of the EU, therefore, in most EU countries education is more expensive for me than for local ones. For example, in Sweden or Finland, one year of graduate study costs 14-18 thousand euros. In Belgium, this amount is several times less: at UGent I pay about 2,000 euros per year.
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