I participated in the Single-cell Transcriptomics + Habenula Neuron Characterization VTP, and found it to be a wonderful supplement to my high school STEM curriculum.

My favorite part of the course was being surrounded by people who were eager to learn, and who were much more experienced than I! It certainly made for a busy week, but it was a great way to learn; I found that the wide variety of resources I had to work with provided the right amount of scaffolding and opportunity for independent thinking considering it was my first time working with R and bioinformatics software libraries.

Seeing others’ questions and results, and being able to troubleshoot and get feedback from the mentors through a combination of the AI platform, asynchronous group channel and zoom cohort meetings resulted in a deeper understanding of single-cell RNA-sequencing analysis and was a rewarding experience.