<p>I'm planning on being a bioinformatics researcher, and getting my master's in bioinformatics at some college in the future, but my current college doesn't have a bioinformatics program. I'm planning on taking courses in biology, chemistry, and computer science as an undergraduate, but can anyone give advice on what my main focus/major should be in? Biology, Biochemistry, or Computer Science?</p>
<p>A computer science major would be overkill. You should take a few programming courses and maybe a course on algorithms or theory of computation, but you don’t need any of the technical courses required for a computer science degree (computer organization, operating systems, compilers, etc).</p>
<p>What do you like to do? Do you primarily like biology, and would you do some other biology/biochemistry-related research if bioinformatics didn’t work out for you? Be a biochem/bio major.</p>
<p>If you like computers, are primarily interested in programming, figuring out how they work, studying algorithms, etc. and think bioinformatics is neat but would rather work with computers if bioinformatics doesn’t hold your interest, be a comp. sci. major.</p>
<p>I have to say that a computer science major wouldn’t necessarily be overkill if you were really sure that’s what you wanted to do. In a bioinformatics lab, a biologist or biochemist might make the overall decisions related to research, and a computer scientist with little knowledge of biology would actually do the work programming a database that stores information about enzymes, devise an algorithm that predicts genes in DNA, gives a graphical representation of genomes, calculates protein folding, or calculates ion transport across membranes in a neuron, for example.</p>
<p>So it depends on where your interests lie.</p>
<p>Hmm, thank you b@r!um and davidmigl, you’ve both greatly assissted me in making my final decision. Even though I haven’t been able to take chemistry since my sophomore year in high school, I’m still far more passionate about Biochemistry than anything else. I think I focus on becoming a biochemistry major, and then just intergrating some basic computer science skills into it afterword. Once again, thank you both for your input.</p>