1.1 Second wind

I remember saying to myself at the start of honours that I’ve been granted a second chance to prove myself and I would therefore make the most out of it by working really really hard and getting a 1st class honours. Then I could only show people my honours grade, which would effectively bypass my abysmal grades. That was wishful thinking.

I literally jumped into the deep end of bioinformatics. In my Bachelor of Science degree, I did not take a single computing or mathematics course and I had no prior programming exposure (apart from writing some HTML, which doesn’t count). Despite being determined to work hard, it was difficult and almost impossible for me to learn because what was supposed to be introductory material was completely incomprehensible. I recall joining the first lab meeting where they were discussing about these things called Markov clusters, which even when I considered as separate words, had no idea what they were. But the thing that was the major problem was that I didn’t ask for help because first I didn’t want to bother anyone and second I didn’t have the self confidence to admit that I didn’t know something.

It’s easy to lose focus and determination when nothing you read makes any sense. I tried coming into the lab on the weekends to read papers but I couldn’t make any sense of them. The only thing that kept my attention was learning Unix and Perl because it was hands on and I was good at hacking (not the type of hacking where you break into computer systems by exploiting weaknesses but the type where you use something in a way that it wasn’t designed for) and Perl was (unfortunately) perfect for that. Back then you couldn’t look up Stack Overflow so you just kept trying stuff. Maybe if I didn’t use Perl, I wouldn’t have gotten anything done in my honours year.