"I am doing bioinformatics"

Sometimes when I am at work people pass by, look at my screen and ask me what I am doing. I often reply that "I am doing bioinformatics". Let me explain why this is not meant as a short uninformative, almost a bit rude, answer.

Going from theoretical physics to bioinformatics, I quickly realised that some things were different. The change from "physics" to "bio" wasn't as big a deal as I thought it would be; what caught me off guard was the "theoretical" to "informatics".

I was writing code all the way through my physics PhD but it was almost exclusively within my own code: there were very little interaction with other peoples methods or data. A few tab-separated text files with prediction from other groups methods and data from a couple of experiments, and that all the relevant data there was for my project. The following cartoon describes more or less what was going on. Area of boxes and width of arrows represents time and effort spent.

  

 Despite my romantic hopes as a master student, most of the time I was not standing in front of the blackboard unravelling the mysteries of the universe. Nonetheless, I got some of that, and the rest was essentially writing my own (well, within my group) code for my Monte Carlo simulation. A minor annoyance was bringing external data (grey box) as I couldn't control the format of the data (red arrow), but it probably happened less than ten times over the course of five years.

 Bioinformatics, apart from my own analysis, involve an effectively endless list of interactions with data and methods that I have no control over. The corresponding cartoon would be something like this:

As you can see, there is a lot more grey boxes and red arrows, which seems to be an important difference between "theoretical" and "informatics". While I may have exaggerated a bit with the ratio of grey area to red area, I still spend a significant amount of time on getting public tools and data to work to fit into the rest of my analysis. I know exactly what I want to do, but it can still take me a lot of time.

Sometimes when I am at work in the middle of converting between file formats or some other grey box, people pass by, look at my screen full of messy terminal tabs and ask me what I am doing. At that point there is no point in going into detailed explanations, but I stick with a ":/" and "I am doing bioinformatics".