Supportive Courses for Bioinformatics?

Per Christian Henden asks: "I`m aiming for a masters degree in bioinformatics, and I`m uncertain which courses would be good to follow (and my counselor doesn't know, either). There are of course some courses that 'belong' to this degree, and I`ll take those, but I get to choose a number of additional courses. I want to ask people working in bioinformatics 'What (CS) subjects are important or especially useful in bioinformatics?' I`m planning on choosing 'Large Datasets', 'Parallel Programming', 'Image Classification', and 'Subsymbolic AI', because I think those are important, but I`m really not sure what is useful or not in real life bioinformatics." Other Ask Slashdot articles, which have touched on bioinformatics, have dealt with magazines, books and graduate schools.

Comments

Take Biology

[biodork]

I work for a Bioinformatics company. Biology Biology Biology Biology!!! We have, and they are not doing as well, several people who with more of a CS background. They don't understand what it is that they are writing programs/algorithms about. We have found it easier to take Biologists who know computers and get good work from them than to do the converse. Make sure you get a VERY good grounding in basic biology. If you don't know what the data you are looking at mean, in the biological sense, then you will make the same mistake a lot do. Just because an algorithm is cool doesn't mean it makes sense. Only by understanding the Biology can you understand the difference.