Building your niche in bioinformatics

Over the summer, I learned why building a niche in bioinformatics is important. It helps you overcome impostor syndrome, especially when you're just entering the research space.

A personal monopoly

I spent the summer at the New York Genome Center, interning at the G2 lab. There, I met a handful of friendly, funny, and smart people. But I felt out of place. As an undergraduate entering a space dominated by PhDs and post-docs, I felt like the work I was doing was scientifically bogus. It felt like I was working on a middle-school science fair project.

Things took a turn when I had to pitch my research project to my lab mates. I immediately learned that I was—in fact—the most knowledgable person in the room in the niche field of genotyping long tandem repeats from short-read sequencing data. I had spent two weeks reading every paper there was on this topic. Clearly, I was not an impostor, I just had to realize that fitting into a research space was less about experience and more about being knowledgeable in a niche.

Coincidently, I've been reading a bit about building a personal monopoly from Dave Perell. His advice applies to the research community as well—you can find a niche that interests you and become the smartest person in that space.

Niche polyhedrons

This realization shouldn't have come as a surprise to me. I was surrounded by people who had developed their niche through years of academic training. In my lab, there were people who were very knowledgeable about obscure cryptography theory, evolutionary biology, and federated machine learning. Every niche present in the room was a surface on an increasingly complex polyhedron. This meant that the surface area for learning was large—and I learned a ton in such a short amount of time.

So, surrounding yourself with a diversity of niche experts is the fastest way to learn in a research setting. And you can become part of that diversity by finding your niche.