Graduating with a BS in Molecular & Cell Biology (minors in Bioinformatics + CS), and planning to apply to PhD programs in bioinformatics, computational biology, or biomolecular engineering. Taking a gap year to strengthen my application, but don’t have anything lined up yet (job/lab/etc). Tried applying to specific post-bac programs, but they were either cut due to NIH funding or rejected.
I’ve worked in 4 labs, only 2 are recent and relevant, but I am unable to continue work due to funding. In those, I helped build an RNA-seq pipeline and developed a method to predict isoform orthology across species. In one of the older labs, I contributed to a web-based popgen data browser.
I’m not sure how competitive I am right now or what to focus on to improve. Would doing a master’s first help me get into stronger PhD labs? Or would taking a wet lab tech job and doing computational side projects be a better move? I’m open to advice on both paths. Thank you for any tips!
Comments
You honestly sound like you’re already on a strong path. You’ve done relevant research, you’ve got coding chops, and you’ve actually built real tools—that already puts you ahead of a lot of people applying to comp bio PhDs.
The biggest thing now is probably just getting one more solid, recent research experience under your belt during your gap year—something you can either publish or at least talk about in your apps with confidence. That’ll help tie your story together and show growth.
Between the two paths:
A wet lab tech job is totally fine if it gives you time/room to keep doing computational stuff on the side (either within the job or on your own). It’s also less of a financial burden than a Master’s.
A Master’s could help, but honestly, unless you’re lacking GPA, recs, or experience, it might be overkill—and expensive.
If you can find a research tech or RA role in a lab that blends comp + wet lab work, or lets you publish/code, that’s ideal. Even cold-emailing labs for short-term remote work can help.
And for what it’s worth: your projects already sound solid. You’re not behind. You just need to round out your story a little and keep building momentum.
If you need help structuring emails to labs or thinking of side project ideas, happy to bounce ideas.
The most important factor is research experience in the exact thing you are applying for. Any sort of pivot will make you less competitive.
If you want to do comp bio, you need comp bio experience. Wet lab work honestly doesn’t help much or at all from what I see. You’d be better off doing related computational work on an unrelated topic than doing wet lab work but not gaining computational experience. It’s easier to teach someone who already has cs skills enough biology to do the job, but it’s extremely difficult to teach a pure biologist/wet lab person basic computer science skills… Programs honestly have a hard time finding people with solid cs skills because they tend to go to industry to make more money.
If most of your time will be doing wet lab, it’s probably not worth it. If the side projects are purely personal and have no support from the lab, it’s unlikely to be very helpful unless you do something that really stands out, which most people cannot do by themselves. Most personal projects are basically just copies kaggle competitions or something basic/similar… Not impressive
Being good at computational biology