MODELERS FACE A VARIETY OF CHALLENGES.
Although the usefulness and appreciation of modeling as a field is always increasing, modelers today often experience a few setbacks. We often teach ourselves difficult concepts in an effort to innovate along any of the fields we operate in (coding, math, biology, statistics). We may complete our degrees in a kind of isolation, with little to no local cohort. We may struggle with communicating across disciplines, and may have trouble identifying mentors in every discpline that we want to have in our toolbox. And the sheer number of papers you feel you need to read…
MODELING AND THEORY CAN BE ISOLATING. LET’S GET THROUGH THIS TOGETHER.
We want this community to serve as an outlet for people operating within the often isolating experience of science, whether in industry or academia. Science has trouble keeping its more diverse members. The already isolating experience of something as niche as modeling may exacerbate already-negative experiences. We hope that this community could mitigate some of these experiences and support any modeler. Whether you need mentorship, companionship, or an empathetic ear, we intend for this community to help serve that purpose.
WHO WE ARE
We are two recently graduated computational biologists. The lack of a visible online community, and the unique challenges faced by modelers in increasingly interdisciplinary (niche) areas has motivated us to start our own community of early career modelers.
You can read our community guidelines and brainstorming ideas of where to take this next. Feel free to share any ideas you might have! The resources we collate will be shared via our Twitter. Please follow us if you’re a modeler, so we can promote your work.
Join us…
Check out our website and click here to sign up!
Join the discord by clicking this link. Never used discord? Here’s a 3 minute walk-through I made to help you out. Apologies in advance – I’m a little antsy with my mouse, and this isn’t exactly scripted.
Discord is a flexible messaging and video/voice chatting service. Or, take a look at this visual overview:
Our websites and ‘forum’ capabilities are through Github and using Markdown. Learning Github and Markdown are fully optional, as we have implemented easy ways to interact with the system through Twitter and Discord. However, Github is very useful for versioning your code or writing; and markdown is a plan text formatting system that is useful if you need to work with code (or R markdown, for example, follows these principles).
Github
If you’ve never used Github before, here’s a 2 minute walk-through (don’t worry about Deadpool).
If you watch the Github, you will get email notifications whenever new issues are raised or commented on (Gmail auto-sorts these as forum posts). Our twitter will also share new issues.
Useful Links:
Markdown cheat sheet: https://www.markdownguide.org/cheat-sheet/
Comprehensive guide to Github: https://guides.github.com/
To learn more about opening issues, check out this tutorial – a 10 minute read https://guides.github.com/features/issues/
i am become computational 