 Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's Bite Size. I'm very happy to have with me Alyssa Briggs and Mariana Gullard G. I nearly got it. Gullard G. Anyway, I tried. So these were mentor and mentee, respectively, in the mentorship program that just closed. And they will give us some of their impressions during the time there. And now it's off to you. All right. Hello, everyone. Thank you for the introduction. And thank you for joining us here. So yeah, I'm Alyssa. I will be going ahead and starting our presentation. Mariana, go ahead. All right. So just to start with a little bit of background on us. So we were both a part of the second round of this mentorship program. So we're just going to go over basically what were our assumptions before we started the program. Kind of what goals did we start with? Why did we apply? You know, what were we looking to get out of this? What did we see as some benefits or takeaways from the program? And then just advice for anyone interested, whether it's applying as a mentor or mentee. So go ahead. Okay. So I did just want to show this picture before we got started. So as you can see, this program is quite global. It's grown a lot since the first round and also is expanding into different regions as well. So this is awesome. We're reaching some more underrepresented communities. You can see me up there in the U.S. and then Mariana down here in South America. Yeah. So this is a really cool aspect of the program I thought. Whenever we come together for the larger group meetings in the program, it's awesome to see what everyone is working on and the progress they're making all in different parts. So just a really fun aspect of the program. Okay. So more into what we're going to talk about. The assumptions that we had before starting the program. So one of my assumptions was that the mentor and mentee pairing was going to be based on experiential. So I myself am fairly new with NFCOR Next Glow. I've only been working with it for about a year. So I was really hoping that I could help someone who was essentially completely new so that we could kind of get the most out of the program as possible. And what we found is this was definitely true. A lot of thought goes into making these pairings not just based on experience level but also on your research interests. So Mariana and I both have some interest in kind of viral or pathogen interactions with hosts. And we were able to do some good work that we were both interested in because of that. So this was a really great aspect about the program. Another assumption, this is one that Mariana specifically had, was that there would be kind of strict guidelines and expectations. And what we found is that the program is actually really flexible. So it's not strict. It's not rigid. There are some expectations as to, you know, try to meet two hours a week, try to accomplish certain things without the program, but your options are huge. So you can really cater that to your experience level, how much time you have to put into this and your interests as well. So that was great. And then another assumption was that you can learn next book with no prior experience within the scope of the program. So the program itself is going to just be about four months, which might sound a little bit daunting to try to learn everything about next book in that time. But you absolutely can learn what you need to about next book in that time period. So you can go from having no experience, if that's where you're starting, to ending up with basically the skills needed to write and maintain a pipeline, if that's what you want. So we're going to talk about a little bit about IEANs before the program. When I first applied, I didn't have any experience with next flow and I was starting with bioinformatics. So my main goals involved was to learn how the, to learn the basics, to how to run pipelines. But also I had interest in to learn how to write the code. So not only my own pipelines, but also help in pipelines of other people in the community. And this is going to talk about a little bit about her mentor side. Yeah. So my goals when going into this program, I really wanted to contribute to our NFCORE community in some way. So I had a great experience with having a mentor of my own through my university, who really passed on the skills for NFCORE and next flow to me. And having learned those, I really wanted to be able to pass them on to myself. So that was a big goal. And then I also wanted to gain experience and confidence by teaching the basics of next flow. So as I've said many times, I was fairly new. I've done mentoring and teaching before, but never with anything related to bioinformatics. So I definitely wanted to expand into that and just get more experience and confidence. And then I also went into this wanting to learn from my mentee and fellow mentors. So definitely this isn't a one way street. If you're a mentor, you're still going to learn a lot yourself. And I definitely did. But that was an aim going, going into the program. And as Alisa said before, the program is very flexible. So in your case, what we tried to do was weekly meetings and each meeting we tried to solve a problem. So in the first meetings, we worked on the beginner tutorial of next flow. But we also later worked on pipelines that already existed, but we also tried to implement new pipelines and new models to contribute to NFCORE community. And during this whole process, I was able to learn not only how to run these pipelines, but also how to write and test these new models and pipelines that we tried to implement. And another experience that was really good was to see that not only we can contribute with coach, the NFCORE community, but also in other ways. For example, there is the slack of the NFCORE community and you can reach the questions inside of this slack and answer and help people with their questions. And another way that we can help in the community is helping the translation of the training materials in other languages and English to help people around the globe to learn next flow. So some of my experiences, again, like I said before, even if you're a mentor, it's not a one-way street. Make sure to learn from your mentee strengths. I think that was an awesome part of the program. So of course, I brought more of the NFCORE next flow knowledge to the table. Mariana definitely had her own strengths as well, having been in bioinformatics longer than me. So I learned a lot from her, which was a great experience. And then something that's kind of general, just about working with anyone while you're coding. So it's nice to hack through that code whenever you're working on something and you hit a problem. So you're able to bounce ideas off each other and essentially solve that problem really quickly. So you have these weekly meetings and they're two hours and some people might think that's a big time commitment, but it's really enjoyable. You're working through what you're passionate about and you're having fun while doing something. So great experience. And we show true examples just to show of what can be done during this process. So this is in our case, because at least there's a co-author of this pipeline for integration. And one of the things that need to be done to this pipeline was organize the code into sub-workflow. So instead of the main pipeline, have a bunch of line of code, we just call the sub-workflow in the main pipeline and you organize this code into the new file to work the sub-workflow. And for me, it was an interesting experience to see how to make a pipeline more readable, to see how pipeline organized when we used home next flow. So this is one example. And we try to show another example a little more complex because three mentors, Sebastian, Koja, and Alex were working in a pipeline that involved machine learning and they proposed through their mentee, Luria, to not only learn next flow using this pipeline, but also contribute with this pipeline. So so she was able to learn the basics, but also she made in the end of the program, she was able to make a contribution to the NFCOR community. And we also want to give a little advice for future mentees and mentors. And for the mentees, one thing that is good is try to learn, get and best before the program, at least the basics, because since most of the codes on XFO and NFCOR are on GitHub, this will help you to give you our first steps when you start the program. Also, if you already have some experience with other programming language and you have a pipeline, try to implement this pipeline into an XFO pipeline. You'll see that it's going to have you're going to have a good experience with it. And we had some mentees that did that in our round and they had they had good experience doing that. And also if you're interested in learning pipelines, try to use your own data or data that you are interested in, because in this way you will be able to see how to implement XFO in your everyday life in your career. And then so my advice can apply kind of both to mentors and mentees. My first advice that I'd pass on is don't be afraid to start small. So even if your goal in the end is you want to be working on pipelines, know how much experience you're starting with and where you need to start. So if that's going through training documentation to start with or, you know, trying to just run an NFCOR pipeline, you know, don't be afraid to take these smaller steps along the way. They're worth just as much as being able to write a pipeline down the road. So like Mariana was saying, apply your own research interests. So look for scripts that you're using every day, right? Try to turn them into modules for NFCOR. You're contributing to the community. You're working on what you like and you're not necessarily starting so big that it becomes daunting. Going along with that, I suggest setting something like stepwise goals. You know, if you're starting from the beginning and you have to go through the training documentation and you're trying to work modules and subwork flows and pipelines and all of that, make sure that you celebrate every success and every little thing that you accomplish. I can feel like a lot to get through, especially if you're trying to write a pipeline. So just make sure you're acknowledging all those little steps along the way. And then just don't be afraid to ask for help whenever you're unsure. There's a whole community that's going to be ready to help you. That's going to happen in the regular Slack channels, whichever one is applying to the issue that you're running into, as well as you're going to have your own Slack channel just for your mentorship program. So even if you're a mentor, you know, you don't have to know everything. Feel free to reach out if you have a question and you're going to learn something just as much as your mentors do. Just a few messages for you to take and think about it. The first one is don't, this program is not for people that already have experience or have no experience. It's a program for everyone. So don't be afraid to apply as a mentor or as a mentee because you're going to have a good experience, not only learning Maxwell, but also sharing your knowledge with others. And if you're thinking about applying as a mentor and you're insecure about you don't have an experience or feel experience, always remember that your experience is valuable for someone that doesn't have experience at all with Maxwell. So this person will be happy to be your mentee and have your knowledge. And last, as Alisa said, always leverage each step of the only way in the program because it's a step closer to the goals that both mentors and mentees established in the beginning of the program. All right. So that being said, we're pretty much done with talking about our experiences. So round three of the mentorship is open. The applications are still open until May 15. So if you're interested in applying as a mentor or mentee, make sure you get it in by then. This round is going to run, I believe it's June through the end of September. And then we also have linked here experiences in round two. That's going to be the blog post that talks about the experiences and projects that the pairs worked on during round two. And so yeah, thank you all for joining today. If you have any questions about our experiences, we'll be happy to answer them. Thank you so much, Alisa and Mariana. So now we are open for any questions from the audience. Maybe I can break the ice here. I have a question. No, Phil, you can come in. It's fine. I have a question. Basically, there's one point that everyone always thinks about when they're applying for something like this, which is the time commitment and it was mentioned before. I was wondering how much apart from these two hours that you spend each week together, did you put in separately from these meetings, each of you in a way? Yeah, so we had the two-hour meetings and then of course Mariana would kind of work on some things in addition for a little bit longer and then, you know, whenever we needed to, we'd have conversations on Slack to get her through those issues. So yeah, Mariana, how much time in addition did you spend? I think like four hours maybe, sometimes less, because we worked a lot together during this meeting. So most of the time when I was outside of the meeting, I was like poking some learning more about one thing that we discussed more than the scientific problem. But we had another pair, other pairs that didn't have these kind of weekly meetings. So they just talked through Slack and then if they have like a big problem to solve, then they have the meeting. So it's very effective for both of the mentors and mentees to establish how many times they're going to spend on these interactions. Thank you. Yeah, brilliant talk, thank you. It was really nice to hear your experiences. You spent a lot of time kind of planning how to build this and how formalized it should be and stuff and you're never really sure if it's going to work out. But hearing you guys talk about it really makes me feel very pleased that it was a useful experience for you both. I had a couple of just curiosity questions. I was wondering how much this kind of overlaps with your day job, Mariana. Is this like something you're going to carry on using day-to-day going forward? Is it something you were already kind of trying to do before the mentorship came along? Yes, so right now I am a biologist, so I'm trying to transition into bioinformatics. So for my PhD, I'm thinking about implementing new pipelines that I use that I will use on the Python and R scripts into Nexpo. So my main goal is to try to use on my everyday life from now on. And one thing that I'm trying to do here with my peers is trying to show everyone that Nexpo is a great tool to day-to-day to learn. So I hope that I can convince others to use also. We have a question in the chat. It goes, did you use any tools besides Slack, GitHub and video calls to work together? Yeah, on the beginning we used Github, right? Yeah, we used Github for a little while and then we actually transitioned over to VSCode and we're using LiveShare a lot. That was super helpful in terms of trying to code together. I think those are the main programs we used. Yeah, maybe I should have mentioned that. Anyone can unmute themselves. I allow that now. So if you have a question, just unmute yourself. Is there anything you would do differently if you were starting together again next week? So I think my main thing that I would do differently since this was the first time I'd mentored, and of course Nexpo and anything like that, is to set kind of like I said earlier, more stepwise goals. Going in, we weren't exactly sure what to work on, I guess, which was kind of one of the harder parts of the program is figuring out what to work on, or if you want to convert some script into an NFCOR module, trying to make sure that it fits the standards that NFCOR has. So really working through that and trying to come up with those stepwise goals maybe in advance I think would have been helpful to give us a little bit more direction. So that's kind of what I would have done differently. And I totally agree because in the beginning I had probably I should look more into the pipelines and models that already existed. So I had the idea how to write my own pipeline or something like that. But we had some good experience trying to find out which way to go. So in the end we had a good experience because we tried a lot of different ways. And that was good, but this what Abyssa said, I agree, that would be a good way to restart. I guess that's kind of the downside of having it very flexible. When you say you work on anything, and then it's difficult to know what to work on. Do we have any more questions from the audience? Do we have any more questions from Phil? I could probably think of more, but I've said quite a few already. Well, in that case I would very much want to thank you both for being here today and presenting the work also that you've done. And I want to thank you also specifically for contributing to NFCOR. It's lovely to have you in the community. And of course I want to thank the audience for listening in and the Jan Zuckerberg Initiative for funding the talks. And as it happens also this mentorship program. Thank you very much and have a great day.