Fig 1.
Two images from the PINC Instagram feed (https://www.instagram.com/sfsupinc/), where we celebrate current students and alums.
On the left, Elizabeth Mathiasen (current PINC student) says: “I love being in the PINC Program. I have gone from being a person who was terrified of coding, to a person who is now able to mentor other PINC students as they begin their journey. It was scary at first to go outside of my discipline (biology), but learning to code has opened up so many more research possibilities for me. I’m in a computational lab now doing an important ecology project that would be impossible without coding.” On the right, former PINC student and current UCLA PhD student Maria Flores says: “My journey through the PINC program was definitely not easy, as I am first a biologist and second a programmer, however, the program made it easy for students with no computational background to learn and get experience with popular programming languages. The one-year project course was one of the many challenges I encountered but overcame with the help of my peers and mentors. The PINC program provided me with the confidence to pursue a PhD, as it taught me the necessary computational skills to conduct research that I am passionate about. After my PhD, I hope to pursue a career in Forensic Science and apply what I am learning in Bioinformatics to build more efficient and reliable forensic DNA analysis tools”.
Fig 2.
A flyer to promote the PINC program to bio/chem undergraduate students.
Fig 3.
The curricular structure of the PINC program as offered in 2021–2022.
A full list of classes is included as a supplement S1 Text.
Fig 4.
Important players in the PINC mentor program: professor, mentees, mentor, and mentor trainer.
Fig 5.
(A) Demographics of biology major (left), students in CSC 306 (the first class of the PINC minor, middle) and CS majors (right). Approximately 48% of biology majors are black or Latinx, compared to 24% in the CS major. The students in the PINC class CSC 306 reflect the demographics of the biology program; 46% of them are black or Latinx. Data from SFSU Institutional Research, based on 186 undergraduate students who took CSC 306 between 2016 and 2021. *American Indian and Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students are present in this data but are less than 2% of the population. Thus, they are present within the bar plot but the numerical label is not present in the figure. (B) Demographics of biology major (left), students in CSC 306 (the first class of the PINC minor, middle) and CS majors (right). Approximately 70% of biology majors identify as women, compared to 19.2% in the CS major. Approximately 61.3% of the students in the PINC class CSC 306 identify as women. Data from SFSU Institutional Research, based on 186 undergraduate students who took CSC 306 between 2016 and 2021. *Nonbinary students are present in this data, but are less than 1% of the population. Thus, they are present within the bar plot but the numerical label is not present in the figure. In addition, students who identify as nonbinary may not be listed as such in the university data base.
Fig 6.
List of the main changes we made to the PINC minor between 2016 and 2021.