[BioEdu] Forward of moderated message

[Kevin Karplus]

I disagree that "that any program will teach these topics."  The field
of bioinformatics is very broad, and no program covers all of it. For
example, while UCSC has particular strengths in comparative genomics,
protein structure prediction, archaeal genomics, DNA microarray, RNA
gene finding, and inference of regulatory networks, we have no one in
text-mining of biological literature and metabolic pathway modeling,
and we do little with reconstruction of phylogenetic trees (though a
lto with ancentral genome reconstruction).  We have not worked on
motif discovery or RNA structure prediction in years.

UCSC is a great place to do bioinformatics in the fields we cover
(perhaps the best in the world for comparative genomics, ancestral
genome reconstruction, and RNA gene finding, and one of the top 5 for
protein structure prediction), but we don't pretend to do it all.  We
do screen grad student applicants based on the topics that they say
they are interested in---if their interests do not match our
strengths, we let them go to some other school that is a better fit.
(The students we consider admitting all have multiple offers from
other schools, so we do not feel we *have* to accept them.)

I made the mistake of starting grad school at a brand name school with
a top-rated department that did nothing that interested me.  Luckily,
I managed to switch to a different department (at the same school)
which gave me a great graduate education.  Matching interests is
crucial to a successful graduate school experience.

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Kevin Karplus 	karplus at soe.ucsc.edu	http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
(Senior member, IEEE)	(Board of Directors & Chair of Education Committee, ISCB)
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
Affiliations for identification only.