My long-term goal is to gain more practical
experience in computer science that I can bring to the workplace when I
graduate. This project relates to my goal because I now gear my finished
product towards a larger consumer base versus for a professor or TA. There is a
clear larger impact of my work in this project versus a project in a class. My
programming work in this project also caters my skills in a disciplined way to
be appealing to future employers.
On a weekly basis, I make incremental progress
on my project. I update my professor every week on my progress, however small
it may be sometimes, so I get immediate feedback especially if I need to change
the direction of my project because I am trying to create an algorithm to
accurately cluster DNA sequences based on similarity. An algorithm could change
at any point if efficiency becomes a problem because the purpose of my project
is to give a quick, easy solution to biologists who want to indentify the
composition of fungal metagenomic data. I try to make progress in the right
direction every week and with guidance from my mentor, I get a step closer to
my final product.
This week I made progress trying to analyze how
efficient my algorithm is. I discovered that as I increase the threshold
(percent similarity between sequences), I get fewer clusters and vice versa is
also true. In this project not only do I program but also I get to utilize my
analytical skills to make decisions on how efficient my project is. I think
having authority over the results of my project is also satisfying because my
interpretation of similarity is different from others.
