Data analysis internship not going well because of lack of programming background I started my internship with a biological data analysis institute yesterday (i.e. have spent two full working days there), and I am very concerned that I am expected to have programming skills that I really don't have.
My own background: I have just finished a theoretical physics degree and next year will be persuing a Masters in Mathematics. I have done some programming in my course (an intro to MATLAB, C++ and python in my 3 years respectively), but everything has been very geared towards physics applications. e.g. simulate many body collisions, plot a graph of the transmitted intensity for some funky aperature etc). What's worse, I now realise that we only really looked at very basic features of these programming languages, and basic packages. We never learned the fundamentals of 'how a computer thinks', which is why I am having difficulties now.

I did OK in our programming tasks, and this gave me a really skewed perspective of what it means to know a programming language. I put 'python, MATLAB, basic C++' on the 'skills' section of my CV, not really realising that my knowledge of python really is 'basic' at best. That's the paradox I guess. It feels like with computing, you only know how little you know after you reach a certain level of proficiency. I did not mean to deceive anyone with writing the skills I thought I had.

In any case, I have been struggling over the last couple of days. I realised that at the institute, everyone is basically a programming pro, and the interns are generally computer science students or statisticians. While my degree is numerical, I really have done pathetically little in the way of real data analysis and computing.

I didn't know about Anaconda for instance. I have only ever used simple python libraries like scipy and numpy, matplotlib. I was introduced to it today. But the thing I am struggling with most are things like: what folders does the (programming language? interface? Environment? I don't even know the right word to use here :() have access to? When I want to read/call a file, which folder does it have to be in? How can I check my path without exiting my working environment? etc. Today I wasted 2 hours simply because I called a file name by the name of a python module that I was later calling. I wish I could say t was 'by mistake'. In reality, I didn't think this would be a problem. The text file has an extension anyway?

As you can see these are small things that really require PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE to be ok with. I don't think that cramming a python book will help.

I can tell that the other members of the team are getting annoyed. I don't ask too may questions (nor too little I think). But if I ask a question, it's often too basic. And if I don't I waste time.

The person who gave me a (long) skype interview- the head on my group- is returning tomorrow and we are meeting for the first time. I am quite embarrased, especially as I know they were considering other candidtaes.

Any advice on the best way to proceed, or how to learn what might be useful quickly, would be much appreciated.
Your problem doesn't seem to be programming per se, but rather how a programming language interacts with specific interfaces, environments, and libraries. 

These are things you learn when you need them to. Trust me, you could be a computer science student and still not know any of this unless you had specifically worked with it before. 

The good news is that it doesn't take that long to learn. You don't know how to use Python to interact with folders on a Windows 10 laptop? Google it, you'll figure it out in 1 minute. You don't know how to see the working directory? Google it, figure it out in a minute. And then just keep repeating that. Think up of questions that you think might be relevant to your current tasks, and find the answers.

Start now, and do it for some hours. You'll find that you'll get your head around it quickly. It really isn't that complicated, and you don't have to learn "how a computer thinks" (especially not in Python): you just have to memorize a few lines of code.

It's slightly different with a language like C++ which is more low-level: here, it can be helpful to know exactly what happens, but even still, if you can't understand it immediately, it's fine as long as you at least can memorize the code needed to accomplish the task. 

Oh, and your co-workers being annoyed with an intern after 2 days: They're twats.