My Free Computational Modeling Resources Masterlist
All the resources I used on my first beginner project as a broke girl
Science and research can be notoriously expensive hobbies or career avenues. Research papers alone can cost £35 for 48 hour access — or free if you’re taking out loans for an overpriced university program.
Meanwhile those of us without that money to spend are the ones who are being most impacted by the repercussion of the research being done. We need the perspective of people who have to work to survive… drastically.
I completed my first big project as a beginner computational neuroscientist while working as an unpaid past-time research assistant, running to two nanny job and a one-day a week gig as a hostel receptionist. Who had money for £35 research papers? Not I. Luckily, computational modelling is evolving and while you do need to be in a more secure research position at a larger institution to actually run the big stuff on supercomputers, you can do a lot of good and important work on your own computer for free. So here is a running list of everything I personally used to get myself where I needed to go until I could leverage that in my own masters program.
Paper Panda 2: A Chrome extension you NEED
This little extension is a lifesaver. You can open one of those overpriced research papers behind an elitist paywall that keeps the poor out of science, click this little guy, and it’ll work its ~special magic~. And BAM — free papers. PDFs for days.
Jupyter Lab: Your Home Base for Experimenting
There are a lot of free, open-source programs for running computational models. I actually got Jupyter Lab by accident having started on a different program called Nengo, which moved onto Jupyter Lab. It’s basically just a free notebook for all the programs you’re going to run. It supports a lot of different languages, including Python, R, Julia, and Scala. And on that note…
R and R Studio: Statistical Analysis at Home
R is a programming language you typically learn in graduate research programs. It’s like a coding language that helps you take all the data you collect and organize it how you choose. You can run all sorts of different statistical analyses on it and even make your own visuals like bar graphs and violin graphs. It pretty much does all the work for you. No math needed. Both R and R Studio are free to download and you do need to get both. They can be downloaded on Posit. Being able to say you know how to use R is a super flex on a CV and will instantly open a lot more doors for you in research. You will need to learn how to use it, though, which is why I highly recommend….
Kaggle: Learn to Code without the Subscription
Please just go ahead and get on Kaggle for me, k? It’s a free online coding platform where you can learn any skill under the sun from Python (I learned Python on Kaggle) to R to Deep Learning. What I like about their courses is that many of the “free sites” these days are super gamified and will only let you do a little bit of learning before you hit a limit. What do you need to do to avoid that limit? Purchase a subscription, duh. But not on Kaggle. You could blow through that course in a day if you wanted to. Did I? … No tbh, it took me a minute. But you could in theory.
Kaggle is more geared towards preparing you for skills like creating AI models that are science geared or algorithms that can carry out important functions. It’s not so much for learning how to make a website so they don’t have skills like CSS that are more visual. But they have something really cool which is a competitions page.
Organizations frequently post new competitions of every kind on here that are free to enter and open to Kaggle users. And you can make money off of them! Really incentivises you to build those skills, no? You can also narrow down the competitions you’re looking for. For example, here are some research specific ones:
Unwrapping ancient scrolls? Categorising social behavior of mice? Recognizing forgeries in biomedical research images? There are so many amazing things you can learn to do by just locking in on those coding skills and doing your research. A lot of these might require additional expertise of some kind but any of them can be entered by anyone in theory. You can actually code right within Kaggle using the “Create” feature, and you can also explore other users’ models.
The whole base of the Hopfield network I used for my project was uploaded by a Kaggle user for the public to learn with. I elevated it to my own needs, and I also broke it apart to learn how it worked. That’s what’s amazing about having access to other people’s models.
YouTube: Okay, we all know this one
Youtube is a great online resource with a lot of learning material for free. I learned a lot about neuroscience and how neural networks worked from Youtube. It also helped me survive my own R final (shoutout to “R Programming 101” who is an amazing resource for anyone wanting to learn R). Enough said, I think.
In conclusion…
These are some of the primary free tools I used to make science accessible to me, as a survivor who needed a certain type of science. I paid under £100 for my entire project (unless you count the ridiculous amount of student debt I will be accruing from my masters program). Kaggle can help inspire you and show you the type of work that is necessary right now in a multitude of fields and from there, there are so many resources. I didn’t go to the library myself, but your public library is also a great source of tools for progressing your coding skills or accessing textbooks or etc. There are a lot of great PDFs of books online as well. I made a masterlist of all the books I read to self-learn computational neuroscience, in order, for people interested:
And you can leverage these skills to really upgrade your CV and your portfolio significantly.
Highly recommend computational modeling as a science avenue for people who might not have immediate access to university funds or who want to explore science in their own time! It’s a great, growing field that is a little more accessible to an amateur scientist like I am and you can really do cool things with it.