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College of Life Sciences Biology
Piccolo Lab

Getting Started in the Piccolo Lab

To get started as a student in the lab, please do the following (if you haven't already):

  1. Send me your BYU ID. I will use that to give you to access the bioinformatics lab (4134 LSB).
  2. Go to the CITI training page and complete the "Social & Behavioral Research Investigators." The purpose of these trainings is to help you understand implications for doing research with humans or with data that have been collected from humans. Some of the material will be applicable to your research, while other material will seem less applicable. But it is important to learn these concepts to make sure we are doing research responsibly. The training takes a few hours to complete. Please complete the required quizzes. When you are done, please send me your certificates of completion.
  3. Learn the basics of using Git. Then create an account on GitHub (if you don't already have one).
  4. Decide on a strategy for automatically backing up all code files and documents that you create during the research process. Dropbox and Google Drive offer solutions for automatically synchronizing files to the cloud. Install the software for one of these solutions and make sure it backs up your files automatically. Create a folder where you will store all your research files. Let me know which of these solutions you have set up. (In some cases, we will use GitHub.)
  5. Read the following tutorials:
    1. Thirty-percent feedback
    2. The surprisingly large cost of telling small lies
    3. Ten simple rules for effective computational research
    4. Ten simple rules to make your publication look better
    5. How to get a great letter of recommendation
  6. Learn how to use the vim text editor. This editor has shortcuts that will increase your productivity, and it can be used on any Unix-based server, including the BYU Supercomputer. Here is a helpful tutorial.
  7. If you are willing, email me a photo of yourself (JPG format) as well as a brief paragraph about yourself for the People page.
  8. Lastly, send me an email that indicates when you have completed all of these tasks.