Four months have passed since my last post.
In first weekend of March I took part in Biohack. Unfortunately, I had no chance to work on my own project, since only a few people wanted to work on it, and due to rules it wasn’t allowed to work on. My friends’ applications were rejected :( So, I chose another project - very routine and not-so-interesting-at-all and tried to do my best. Since it is hard not to sleep for 48 hours (I tried!) and to stay productive, I mostly worked from home to save time (approx. 1-1.5 hours from my home to the hackathon’s venue) for actual working. There was a simple but not very interesting project - we were to collect data from Protein Data Bank and to process it in a simple way. Anyway, my birthday was at Friday, March 3rd, I spent it at hackathon and I had no chance to be upset :) No time to think that people you wish would congratulate you don’t even care. We got some results, but I was exhausted. And because I worked from home, I didn’t see the final scripts - project’s idea mentor run it on his own laptop and didn’t committed it to project’s Github repository.
Next week I spontaneously decided to go to another hackathon. I was a little bit disappointed because of my project’s rejection and the whole BioHack thing, and my friend (another ex-BIOCAD worker) told me that his ex-collegue (with whom I had no chance to meet before because he was working there at the time when I was “to-emotional-to-work-with” or something) has a project idea but he has no volunteers to work on it. This hackathon wasn’t scientific, it was devoted to AI and business apps you can build with it. I thought if I can’t work on my idea, at least I could help him to work on his :) I convinced my husband to come with us. At the hackathon another girl (a physicist) joined our brave team. And we won 2nd place. We tried to use RNNs to generate molecules and built several simple models to predict their properties - it was a new field of study for me and for the whole team - no one had previous experience with chemoinformatics and RNNs.
There is an article (in Russian) about it, you can read it here. Unfortunately, the journalist who wrote it made several mistakes - in particular, made a small typo and wrote “Insilo Medicine” instead of “Insilico Medicine”. And it is embarrassing for us, since the article is presented as if we wrote it.
Many other things happened since March, I even became 1/4 of scientific advisor for MSc student!
And there is a thing I realized - being an misused serial intern in one particular company and one particular department and one particular boss - does hurt. I should never do it again. For now I’m not sure if I’ll ever manage to find a job to have a chance to avoid it.