Interdisciplinary education

As the semester winds down and everybody gears up for finals, I’m starting to find a lot of exciting connections between all of my classes. It’s a pretty great feeling, and it always amazes me how exciting it is to be at a place in my academic career where I can start to synthesize all of the knowledge I’ve acquired. This week, I spent a lot of time thinking about computational chemistry and the technology involved in biochemical research. I’m currently enrolled in CS112, which is a computer science course for science majors that teaches Matlab. I’m no coding prodigy, but I really love how efficient and powerful the Matlab program is. Recently, I realized that PDB saves its files in PNG format, which is compatible with Matlab. I think this is super exciting, because I can now upload protein information directly into Matlab and create original programs using the data. I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do with this information, but after loading a few protein structures into Matlab and playing around with the files, I think I’m going to spend some time over the summer experimenting with designing programs for data analysis. In any case, I thought it would be nice to conclude this blogging experience in biochem with some thoughts about where I hope to go in the future with biochemistry. Thanks for a great year, and I hope your finals go well!