Week of August 22
We’ve reached “Week 10”, my final formal week as a DREAM student. It’s the week I had intended to wrap up my analysis before writing my final paper, but since discovering the design flaw, I first spent some time making the necessary code changes before finally getting down to the business of parameter tuning. I ran 81 different sets of parameters through my aligner, producing plots and graphics for each set that will allow me to begin assessing various scoring schemes. Preliminary results indicate that my aligner is capable of producing similar results to a commercial alignment tool previously used on the same dataset.
I plan to continue this project into the fall and spring semesters, and take with me the lessons I’ve learned during the DREAM program. The project started with a clear goal that changed significantly as time went on. I intended to spend the summer doing a largely statistical analysis on a dataset, and ended up building an alignment tool. The process taught me a lot about the far-from-straight path to doing computational research, and I’ve enjoyed every step of it – even the frustrating ones.
I took my first programming class in the summer of 2020. The DREAM program gave me the space and support to develop my first real-world software tool just two years later. I’m looking forward to putting that tool to use in the next two semesters of research, and to putting the investigation, organization, and planning skills I’ve learned to use in the rest of my graduate student career.