For my meetup for the semester, I went to the Precision Medicine meetup in Research Triangle Park. While this meetup wasn’t directly related to programming, it was one that I was able to attend during our class session time period and something that I found very interesting that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.

As a student in the Biomedical and Health Informatics master’s program, I was particularly interested with how the session started out, going through the process of taking raw data and turning it into actionable information. They stated out specific steps needed, such as: -Step 1: Data volume and standardization -Step 2: Data integration and governance -Step 3: Bioinformatics and data science -Step 4: Interoperability and compliance I found the way that these steps were written out very interesting, as I’m in health care and figuring out how to take all of the data available and making it actionable is currently of high value. Further going in and defining how and what to do at each of these steps is going to be really important for each organization.

The meetup also provided a general overview of precision medicine and allowed time for each person there to speak either about personal experience in the area of precision medicine or why they were interested in the topic. As there were people from many different institutions, I could see how this meetup would be a good venue to network and discuss potential collaboration opportunities. I definitely found value in attending this meetup. Precision medicine is going to be a major component of health care moving forward, and combines the areas of science, analytics, and data. I could see myself continuing to attend this meetup in the future and continue to form relationships with the people present. I found the event very enjoyable and the only thing different from my expectations was how casual the meetup was. It was very informal and the setting lent itself to some great discussion.

This was also my first experience using meetup. I wouldn’t have attended this session if it wasn’t for this class, and meetup is something that I’ll now continue to browse in the future to see if there are other meetups of interest and value occurring.