Jorge Vendries-Department of Biological Sciences - Carnegie Mellon University

Friday, January 21, 2011

Jorge Vendries

2011 M.S. in Computational Biology Alumnus

"I am glad that I chose to come here."

I decided to attend the M.S. in Computational Biology program, because I wanted to expand upon my undergraduate degree in computer engineering and utilize my background for something completely different.

The program proved to uphold my expectations. There were many opportunities for me to explore the field of computational biology. For example, I conducted research within a computer science lab, where I wrote code for a gene-mapping program. My coding transformed the data into a tree-based visualization that improved understanding.

In general, the M.S. in Computational Biology program is hard, but academically very rewarding. It definitely provides you with the necessary skills for the field, such as genome sequencing and biological model-building techniques. The teachers are all top-notch in their areas of expertise. They are also very concerned that the students actually understand the material, so they are always available for questions.