I Hosted a Seminar

Intro

I have noticed that many aspiring CS majors, or at least people interested in CS, are often not exposed to computational biology. In fact, I am fairly certain that no one in my school's code club had even heard of computational biology before my seminar.

In any field of science having a variety of perspectives matters a lot. So, it is important that at least some computational biologists come from a CS background rather than a biology background. Reflecting on my own experience, I was one of those CS-focused individuals who became enamored with field.

So, I figured that I would bring expose my fellow peers to the wonderful world of computational biology. Just as Prometheus had brought fire to humanity long ago.

The idea of a seminar came immediately, and I knew that I could leverage my platform as outreach lead in my school's code club to help me, but I felt nervous. Giving a non-mandatory presentation gave me shivers. I was worried about appearing overly passionate and embarrassing myself. For me, this seminar was a story about overcoming those fears, or at least, drowning them out with others ;)

Preparing for the Seminar

First, I had to define a clear goal for the seminar I would give. To do this, I explored many of the ways that computer science has affected healthcare. Did you know that hospitals are some of the most targeted institutions for ransomware attacks?

But why would ransomware attacks target hospitals?

It is because hospitals collect a lot of very valuable data on their patients, and, before you freak out, this information is normally not shared with anyone except your doctor. This data is stored in something called electronic health records, and they can be valuable sources of data for computational modeling.

After compiling a decent reservoir of information on hospitals and the healthcare system. I moved to focusing on biotechnology. Since, a good understanding of computational biology entails a necessary understanding of biotechnology. My aim here was to deliver the information in a way that encapsulated the sheer variety and innovation within the space, without getting bogged down in the details.

While researching I found an interesting stat too. Did you know that the price of DNA sequencing has been falling faster than Moore's law for the past two decades? No wonder so many -omics technologies revolve around PCR and DNA sequencers.

By this point, I was closing in on the essential topic of the seminar: how has the computational biology shaped medical research and the healthcare system. In essence, I hoped that by showing people the amazing impact of the field, I could entice them to explore it for themselves.

I also included a few slides on how deep learning is being used extensively in the field for good measure. It allowed me to develop a pretty good hook around AI by relating it to things they were already familiar with like LLMs.

However, I had a problem. Once, I had assembled a decent presentation. I realized that having a seminar comprised of lecturing for 20 minutes straight was a bad idea. To avoid this, I created my own programming challenges, inspired by the ones on rosalind.info. One of the challenges I faced was providing an extremely easy to set up environment.

Most people do not have python installed on their school laptop, and most of the club was fluent in java not python anyways. Setting up java on a school computer is even more of a nightmare. Instead, I used codiva.io and programmed my own testing system (linked here if you want to use it for yourself).

Lastly, I had to face my own fear in giving a seminar. Would people just walk out, would anyone even show up? I had a nightmare where I was alone and nobody came!

What really helped, if this is happening to you right now, is recognizing that people can detect when you speak with passion and enthusiasm. It is almost an internal radar that everyone has. As humans, I think we really respect people who have passions and hear them out.

The Actual Seminar

Spoiler: it went great!

Even though I was nervous before hand, it kind of faded away in the midst of the first sentence I spoke. However, it was definitely not a smooth ride.

The first slide section was a simple introduction to DNA sequencing, and while I was going through the same explanation that I had heard almost a hundred times in lectures and courses, I began to accrue some puzzled looks. In fact, I could visibly see people checking out, before I had really even begun.

This brought the nervousness back in full force and I started stuttering as if I was a typewriter. Luckily, I had the idea to take a generous break to collect myself. I thought about why my audience might be confused. Could I be speaking too fast?

After an awkward silence, I figured I would try something. You see, up until this point, I had been referencing sequencing as if it was a given. I would talk about how we could compare the loci of a specific mutation across a population to build a profile, but within that sentence, I had made a lot of assumptions. It is entirely possible, and even likely, that these people, who hadn't taken biology in a year or two, were shaky on DNA and genetics.

By sheer luck, I had diagnosed this issue early in the seminar, and I switched to a more general language. I framed the previous sentence as: comparing a specific character of a DNA string across a population of individuals, for example. And it worked.

With that train, re-railed, I was able to bring the seminar to its station. At the end, I opened up the problems and worked through some of them with the audience. Overall, it was a blast, and I even got a compliment from our notoriously cynical computer science teacher.

In the future, I definitely plan to do more seminars like this one. Perhaps one targeted towards biology students instead.

Advice on doing a seminar

Firstly, I would start preparing early. Personally, I am very glad that I thought ahead and prepared weeks in advance. While you are preparing, consider your audience and what they might be interested in hearing. I believe that a lot of my positive reception was due to providing information about computational biology that my audience could benefit from when deciding a career path.

Make sure to break up your presenting with activities. I could have done this better in retrospect by incorporating more engagement into my presentation.

I would implore you to recognize that a school presentation is very different from a seminar. A seminar is something that you host yourself, you have so much more freedom to present in a way that you want. Use this freedom to make your presentation interesting and unique.

Lastly, I have found that the nervousness of public speaking really does not go away, except with experience. So, I embraced the nervousness and accepted it rather than be dragged down by it and let it get in my way.