During my early days as a younger student (now I'm an older student), I would enter competitions to practice the data science skills I gained in the classroom. Platforms like Kaggle, Datacamp, Hackspace, and many others became my evening routine. More often than not, I would cower away and only attempt competitions that were already completed, as I didn't believe in myself enough to win the live ones. Imposter syndrome type things, but who doesn't have this, right? I would have loved to win some prize money or be ranked on a leaderboard (truth be told, I don't like leaderboards—I find them intimidating for all the wrong reasons, mostly fear, but again, who hasn't experienced fear). The timelines and deadlines also were scary. I would freeze when I thought about the time aspect of it (flight, fight, freeze). But, time and project management were a skill I was supposed to be learning from these things. Delivering and improving instead of pure perfection from the word go.

But I, as many other early career researchers do, did want to be great at my skills, and I still do. So I practiced, and still do, with these challenges. They help put to practice multiple technical and social skills together. From time management, to learning new things, creativity, team work, how to ask questions, and how to apply yourself. Challenges make you work out basic skills and teach you how to present them creatively, and clearly to diverse audiences.

What's your take on bioinformatics competitions?

I ask this for two reasons.

First, I recently joined a competition on Zindi—a brilliant platform for learning and practicing machine learning techniques. It offers everything from bioinformatics to machine learning. The competition I joined was a microbiome classification challenge. You can check it out here for more details. Essentially, you build an ML model to classify microbiomes based on their sample body site. If you're not an expert in 16S rRNA analysis, this challenge is perfect for you. You'll definitely experience that satisfying "frustration-to-understanding" learning curve.

Second, I'm interested in how we can use competitions to build our community more. We recently hosted a hackathon, and witnessing participants form teams and embrace that competitive spirit was brilliant. We also got to learn of challenges our members face, both technical and social, that our community can step in and address. It really helps tailor our workings.

Building Better Experiences

We keep wondering how we can create better experiences for our community. Provide a platform to win, literally and figuratively. As we explore this, we'll start by connecting you with interesting competitions and creating a Slack channel for team formation and questions. We'd also love to hear about your experiences with competitions. Did you win anything? Did you compete alone or with a team? What was it like? Sharing your story could inspire others in our community and help us know how to do this better for you.