Every time I attempt blogging it seems like a good idea, and fizzles after a week or two ... so here we go again. What will be different this time?
Well, the context of this blog is to document the process for a research project I am embarking on. This is a new journey for me. In early August I had emailed my new Marketing Prof. Christian Bach, requesting a syllabus and a heads up on the Marketing course I was about to engage with him this coming fall. After a couple of emails he invited me to consider being a part of a research project he was engaged in. Wanting to met my professor before class started, I said sure we can meet.
On Wed. August 24th I met Professor Bach along with 3 other students, and he went over some of the goals of his research plan. Honestly, it was so over my head talking about Human Genomes, proteins, DNA sequences, and more I felt totally clueless. Also, Prof. Bach has this dream and vision of the world of researchers all living in harmony sharing work together for the good of mankind. He talked about a "Facebook" like website for researchers ... again, it is great to dream ... and it is great to set such high goals that we never have a chance in hell of coming close.
After a couple of hours, of discussion, and academic babble that made my head spin ... I was finally able to ask some simple basic questions for simple minded folk like me to understand what he really meant. From there, I asked him ... "If I could write a program to do 1 thing, just 1 thing to make something better, easier for you what would it do?" Prof. Bach pulled out an Excel spreadsheet, and should me 6 tabs of research data, and how he would like to see them combined on to a single page. I said, if I could create a tool that allowed you to choose each high level DNA sequence and display the resulting matrix would that be a good step. Can I have 2 weeks to do this ... He said, I have waited 7 years, 2 weeks is fine.
After that session, Prof. Bach & I enjoy a couple of cold beers, some Mexican food, and it was so great to be stimulated by academic philosophical problem solving, energized by Sam Adams & Blue Moon. I made it home by 11:00 PM that night. Prof. Bach had sent me the spreadsheet, I look at the data, was able to normalize the data into a comma delimited text file. I then wrote simple php program to give him the DNA sequence pull downs, and the resulting data protein matrix display ... by 1:00 AM an email and a link was in his inbox.
The next day Prof. Bach confirmed, I had delivered the first objective. He was pleased.
While feeling very outclassed and don't even pretend to understand what the human genome is, haven't a clue about DNA & Proteins ... I will leave that up to really smart guys like Prof Bach ... I do see that my practical business sense and ability to ask questions to understand and determine what the customer wants will be an asset to this research project.
No comments:
Post a Comment