Demonstrate your skills by reproducing published research papers. Add these re-analyses to public github repositories and list them in your CV. Branch out into different domains, RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq, Assembly and across different organisms. Show that you can handle different tasks. In my opinion the ability to demonstrate skill in across different types of analyses is a very strong signal and better than having a few publications.

Hi Curious cactus

You should start by analyzing published research from NCBI. Use their native CLI tool to fetch FASTQ datasets and analyze them using R and Python. Use Claude/GPT for the start.

However, if you want to skip coding for first few tries, use Notchbio.app for early tests. I created this tool for free that you can use to analyse rna-seq datsets. Since you're starting, downloading all necessary tools and libraries might be overwhelming for you. Take any bulk-rna seq dataset of human genome and run it through the tool. Within a few minutes, you will have your visualizations. This will give you some understanding into how each step works (without the code) and whats the need or output of that step. When confident, you can switch to R and Python for learning.