What are the expectations of bioinformatics Masters students? Country: Looking for answers for US/Canada/UK/Germany, ideally Canada.

Subject: bioinformatics



I am starting a bioinformatics MSc degree in a biology department of my university (no bioinformatics dept exists).

Until this point, I've talked mostly with grad students pursuing biology degrees. The expectations for bio MSc student have been described to me as produce data for 1-2 figures. PhD students are expected to produce good data for an entire paper, i.e. 5-6 figures.

Similarly, what are the expectations for MSc students in bioinformatics?



For masters, is it possible to take an open source tool and build on top of it to solve some issue it has?

Basically there is a tool that has two components A and B. Component A is fine as it is but component B is done poorly - so many people can't really use it. Can I take this tool, scrap a part of it and redo it?
Hopefully I can help - graduated a similar Master's in EU.  

At least here, a PhD student is expected to produce 3-4, not 1 paper, so it is reasonable to expect contributions equivalent to one paper from a Master's student. Of course, time is limiting, so students usually finish the actual paper later on (sometimes even during the PhD), but I would suggest working with that goal (i.e. 1 paper) in mind.  

Now, as to what constitutes a paper in this field: improving a tool is fine, as long as you provide proof of the improvement. Proof usually comes from simulation studies, or it could be a demo of application using some publicly available data (I assume your tool is somehow connected to data analysis). In my field, this might be one of the best known examples - improving the efficiency of a popular tool from O(n^2) to O(n) is a direct way to Nature Genetics and hundreds of citations.