Motivation for GitHub

May 29, 2014 • Scott Burns

Here is my link to a motivation for using GitHub.

Demotivating experience

As part of my required courses in graduate school, I had to take a low-level systems biology class. Because only students from the department took the class, the professor and other students all knew to some degree what kind of work everyone was involved in. This meant the professor knew which students really needed to grasp the material and which didn’t. From the first day of class, I felt like one of the “less important” students and was told as much. Also, the “lab” section of the class involved digging into methodological papers in the field. I figured out very quickly that I would not need to develop skills in any of these methods and hence I cared very little about thoroughly reading & understanding the papers.

I think the professor could have made more effort to engage students that worked in other fields even though the course material would be of little use later on. Even though I didn’t use the methods covered in the lab section, some effort could have been made to help students better understand experimental design in general, the design of figures, etc., otherwise useful and general tools for scientists.