Outreachy June 2025 Interns at Bioconductor | R bloggers

Victoria’s experience

Hello, my name is Victoria Poromon and I am a graduate in Microbiology from the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. I contributed to the BugSigDB project since March 2024, and you can read about my experience as an Outreachy June2025 intern here.

Over the past few months I have completed individual tasks, collaborated with fellow contributors and my co-intern, participated in peer reviews, written several blog posts, including one I am particularly proud of: the Step-by-step guide to contributing to BugSigDB. More recently, I even took my first step into co-mentoring!

Every encounter and milestone has taught me something new, broadened my perspective and supported my personal and professional growth.

These are the lessons that stuck with me:

• Take your time: I’ve always believed in not rushing important work, and this project reinforced that mentality. Because it requires careful attention to detail and accuracy, moving too quickly can make it easy to miss what really matters.
• Collaborate, not compete: It’s normal for others to know things I don’t know, but what’s not acceptable is choosing to remain ignorant. The collaboration has allowed me to both learn from others and share my own knowledge in return.
• Know when to ask questions: If you’re stuck on a task for hours despite troubleshooting and research, this is the perfect time to ask your mentors for help. By doing this you demonstrate curiosity, you can overcome challenges more efficiently and you can often learn more deeply.
• Know when to ask for help: I learned from my mentor, Svetlana, that asking for help is a valuable skill. It is not a sign of weakness, but a demonstration of strength, self-awareness and willingness to learn.
• Always speak kindly: It’s not enough to simply know how to communicate; It is just as important to do this with kindness and consideration for others. As both a contributor and co-mentor, I have come to deeply appreciate this quality. Thoughtful communication not only shows respect, but also helps create a safe and supportive environment.

My journey with the Bioconductor community has been guided every step of the way, from the big things like grading my tasks, learning new skills, and providing guidance on my job applications, to the little details like dotting my i’s and placing my commas correctly. Every day I am reminded why I chose to stay.

By the end of my internship (June 2025 cohort), I have not only strengthened my technical skills, but also gained confidence, built a meaningful network, and laid a solid foundation for my continued involvement in open source. You can find all my contributions here.

I am super grateful to everyone in the Bioconductor community for giving me an opportunity, especially my mentors Svetlana, ChloeAnd Katefor literally holding my hand every step of the way and my brilliant co-intern Anne-Marie Scherp. I have grown tremendously and become a better contributor because I have learned from the very best.

Anne-Marie’s experience

Hello, I’m Anne-Marie Sharp. I am a biomedical scientist and aspiring bioinformatician. End of 2024 my curiosity made me want to find out more about the Accessibility did an internship for the first time and then went to the Bioconductor project – Microbiome Study Curation (BugSigDB) where I contributed as an intern to the June 2025 Outreachy cohort.

I was completely new to the world of open source and it took extra effort to quickly get acquainted not only with the various online communication platforms, but also with the art, or rather the science, of curating microbiome studies; but my curiosity and passion for science kept me going during the Outreachy contribution phase. I was also excited about the new skills I learned, such as data curation, analysis, and literature research. And I was fascinated by the collaboration within the community. This collaboration also allowed me to learn quickly, as I freely asked questions and received answers from mentors and fellow curators, and often collaborated with other curators, gaining different perspectives and insights into curation.

As an avid learner, I was and still am excited that there is always something new to learn while working on the project. Whether it’s the core science of the microbiome, improving my language skills in R programming, curating itself or even improving my soft skills. Indeed, it only gets better.