title: Soft skills: an important asset acquired from organizing regional student group activities.
abstract: Contributing to a student organization, such as the International Society for Computational Biology Student Council (ISCB-SC) and its Regional Student Group (RSG) program, takes time and energy. Both are scarce commodities, especially when you are trying to find your place in the world of computational biology as a graduate student. It comes as no surprise that organizing ISCB-SC-related activities sometimes interferes with day-to-day research and shakes up your priority list. However, we unanimously agree that the rewards, both in the short as well as the long term, make the time spent on these extracurricular activities more than worth it. In this article, we will explain what makes this so worthwhile: soft skills.
authors.affiliation: Delft Bioinformatics Lab, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jeroen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: de Ridder
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Informatics Research Center Antwerp (biomina), University of Antwerp/Antwerp University Hospital, Antwerp, Belgium; Department of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium.
authors.forename: Pieter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Meysman
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer and Information Sciences, School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria, West Africa.
authors.forename: Olugbenga
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Oluwagbemi
authors.affiliation: Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America; VIB Department of Plant Systems Biology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Abeel
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000193:education / Q000458:organization & administration; D006801:Humans; D007857:Leadership; D012201:Reward; D060756:Social Networking; D066107:Social Skills; D013334:Students