Last year I was a participant in the 2014 Next Gen Sequence course at [Kellogg Biological Station] (http://www.kbs.msu.edu/) led by C. Titus Brown. After just two short weeks I left amazed and empowered. We covered a vast array of topics including: cloud computing using [amazon cloud services] (https://aws.amazon.com/), genome assembly, mRNA-seq, experimental design, open science, etc. The instructors brought great energy and made the course accessible to students at all levels. Upon returning to my lab I dove into analyzing my own ngs data and never looked back. This summer I had the pleasure of returning to Kellogg Biological station and beautiful gull lake to TA the [2015 course] (http://angus.readthedocs.org/en/2015/).

We had an extremely eager and diverse group of participants from the US and abroad that came to the course from research one institutions and small primarily undergraduate institutions. We had tenured faculty, post-docs and graduate students. All were eager to learn which was great considering we covered tons of material including:

• Cloud computing
• Quality trimming
• Genome/Transcriptome assembly
• RNA-seq
• Open science
• Experimental design/project organization

and many other things. One of the HIGHLIGHTS of the course was the arrival Nick Loman with what may have been a gift from his adventures in time travel; the MinION. We used this pocket sized magic wand to sequence Escherichia coli K-12 MG1655. Personally, I’d never seen a MinION and couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d do if I had one. [WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!!!] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeYo3fXkKco&index=5&list=PLddSkUxmPEC8lHdanWXqxUSvznqcG8ja_)

All in all, we covered a lot and I think that many of the participants left feeling empowered just as I had the summer before. Honestly, I learned a ton as well. But… we also played a lot and I think it helped build a better learning environment. Volleyball and ping-pong tend to bring out the best in people. Thank you good people.

It looks like the course will be up and running again next year and I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in ngs data analysis.