Computational Biology is by far the most important course I have taken in my undergraduate education. Before this class, I had no real concept of what happens to biological data after it was collected; I simply assumed that a statistical test was performed on the data that would prove or disprove the hypothesis. Now I understand that cleaning the data and making graphics that clearly show your analysis results is just as important to the scientific process as data collection itself. In this course I learned how to code on the command line in a Linux environment, write scripts, use regex to parse data, perform data analysis, and create publication-worthy graphics of my results in RStudio. These skills are vitally important to the modern biologist, and I am thankful to have them to use in my research on campus and beyond. To the left of this paragraph is my code for the final for this class, where I wrote a script working with a real herpetologist’s data to answer a real scientific question.