2.1 Wes

When I was at CSIRO I was under the tutelage1 of Wes, who was the sys admin and bioinformatician for Brian’s group. I was a bit nervous when I first met Wes because he had a stern demeanour. The first thing he asked me to do was to write a Perl script to convert one file format to another. I went back to my office, wrote it quickly, and returned to show him what I had done. He was impressed and said he had to come up with more difficult tasks for me to do. And that’s how we worked during most of my “internship”: he would assign me a task and I’ll write a Perl script that would complete the task. But the thing that was the most beneficial was that he would take the time to go through my code line by line with me and suggest how he would tackle the problem. He never told me that his way was the right or better way, only that it was how he would do it but I always did it his way because it was better. And this was how I gradually got better and better in Perl, which at that time was what a lot of people used for bioinformatics.

I was extremely motivated and diligent during my work experience because once again I felt like I was given another chance; I had to make the most out of it. However when my time was almost up, it wasn’t clear whether they had funding for me and I was getting tired of working two jobs mostly because I couldn’t play basketball with my friends/team. I actually didn’t want to expect anything because I didn’t want to be disappointed. But when Brian told me they had funding for me for at least a year, I was ecstatic! I was going to make a living as a scientist! I remember telling Wes that they had hired me and he said with a smile: “What!? Against all my recommendations!”

I’m forever grateful to Brian and Wes because they gave me the confidence to become a bioinformatian. I’m getting ahead of myself but when my time was up at CSIRO and I managed to get a new job as a bioinformatian at The University of Queensland (UQ), I wrote a long email thanking Wes. I still remember his reply although I can’t find a copy of his email. He told me that he was happy to have been my mentor and that sadly not that many people have the enterprise to learn even though he was always willing to teach. He made me feel like giving myself a little bit of credit. And that was the last thing and maybe the most important thing he bestowed on me.

  1. I learned the word “tutelage” from Brian and I had never seen it until I read a document written by him. To use it here is extra special to me.↩︎