Hi, I’m changing degrees from biochemistry to Biomedical Engineering (concentration in nanotech). My question is should I learn to code, or will it be taught to me in one of my classes? Where is a good place or program (face-to-face or not) to learn this skill? If I need to teach myself what “language” should I learn?
I was also thinking of picking a dual major in one of these engineerings: Software, Mechanical, Electrical, Bioinformatics, or Computer Science?
My ultimate goal (in the future) is to make nanites for medical use (if that helps)
Double majoring in engineering will take you more than 4 years and isn’t really useful. If you want to broaden your course load, by all means do. The extra work it takes to double though won’t have a real payoff.
As for coding, there’s pure programming languages and then programs that are essentially tools with specific purposes. Depending on the internship or job, they might want one, both or neither.
Of the tool type programming there’s Solidworks, Matlab, Labview, AutoCAD, etc. You’ll get exposure to those in school, but can learn any of them on your own if you’d like.
For “pure” coding there are lots of options, Python seems to be a good jumping off point. You can learn that several places, but Code Academy seems to be a good option.
Learning the fundamentals of programming is like learning to write a really strong essay. Once you know how, you should be able to adapt that skill to a lot of topics on many platforms and languages.
Learning a particular language is more like learning to type … or better yet, typeset. Except it’s guaranteed to be obsolete almost immediately (although I guess C might go on for a long, long time yet).
Knowing how to code gives you some fairly powerful tools for data reduction, ways of looking at the mass of information you collect and breaking out the useful parts. There are other uses as well. Need to rename the 350 jpg files to get rid of spaces in file names and replace them with underscores so I-Photo will recognize them? Ten minutes with perl or c-shell. 2.5 hours by hand. You pick
Just don’t think of coding in terms of specific languages, think of it as one of the disciplines of logic and you’ll be fine.
