Alumnus testimonial
Julia Lohr – Alumni MSc Bioinformatics and Scientist Bioinformatics at Danone Nutricia Research
During my Bachelor I discovered Bioinformatics and I became so interested, that I applied to do my Master in this field. The Bioinformatics Master offers a wide variety of possibilities from PhD to industry. As everybody is accumulating more and more data, there is a need for people that know how to analyse and extract information from it.
I feel that this Master has showed me what is possible and gave me an introduction on a wide range of topics. But I don’t feel like an expert yet, so now with my job I would like to gain more hands-on experience.
What is your educational background?
"I did my Bachelor in Biochemistry and one of the courses I had was Bioinformatics. I became so interested in the subject that I became a teaching assistant and did my thesis in this field. I quite enjoyed it so I decided to continue my studies in Bioinformatics. I specifically applied at WUR because I saw in the course-handbook and curriculum that I would be taught whatever knowledge I lacked. I could come from a Biology or an Informatics background and graduate as a knowledgeable Bioinformatician. In fact, when I started in Wageningen I was not familiar with any of coding language besides R. But with courses like ‘Phyton for beginners’ and ‘Software engineering in Java’, which are very fun and good courses, I managed to fill my personal knowledge gap."
Did your internship help you find a job?
"Definitely! I did my internship at the company Danone Nutricia Research and was tasked with the analysis of clinical data from human samples. Essentially, I had a diseased population and a healthy population and I was asked to find differences between them or differences between the countries the samples came from. Then, after my graduation I was looking for a job when my internship supervisor came back to me and suggested to apply for a project-based position in the Danone Nutricia Research. I went for it and got the temporary job. At the moment I am still working there and still learning new things about the project, my job and Biostatistics. The project-based work is temporary, but as of October 2022 I have a permanent contract with Danone Nutricia Research. I’m very excited about moving to Utrecht and properly starting work-life."
What have been the main challenges in finding a job?
"The lack of experience has been the biggest challenge. Together with the fact that I haven’t done a PhD. When I was looking through vacancies in search of a job, most were asking for a PhD or many years of experience, neither of which I had. I want to gain some work experience before considering a PhD, but this narrowed down the search-hits and made it more challenging to find a proper job when I’m freshly graduated."