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Ask HN: How to transition into Biotech?

by mactavish88 on 2/20/23, 1:14 AM with 4 comments

Can anyone perhaps recommend any strategies/approaches for transitioning into biotech, without having had any experience specifically in biotech?

I’ve personally been working at non-FAANG companies across several different industries for 15 years, recently in team lead roles, mostly in the open source arena. Most recently in a project lead role, which I don’t enjoy too much.

  • by mardiyah on 2/20/23, 2:23 AM

    Explore few prominent (organic) chemistry softwares in intensive depth eg:

    Chemdraw for creating organic chemical structures, schemes, diagrams/figures, which can be exported to other programs

    SciFinder and Reaxys for searching the chemical literature and doing background research

    Gaussview and Gaussian09 to submit and run DFT or ab initio calculations on molecules

    MestReNova / MestRec

  • by anonymouskimmer on 2/20/23, 1:45 AM

    I'm in biotech but I'm not a programmer. Have you looked at job listings to see where your experience parallels and where it doesn't?

    From what I've seen many of the programmers with biotech experience don't really have a good understanding of what we do in the lab. Communication is really important.