Practical Knowledge/Skills
Realistically, you don’t need to know everything about neuroimaging to still be a contributing member of a research team. With a steep learning curve, it is in everyone’s best interest that this is the case. Quite frankly, jumping right into hands-on work is one of the best ways to learn in my humble opinion. There will always be some not-so-fun tasks that are also great learning experiences that someone can contribute to with minimal knowledge of the field. With that being said, the more that you learn on the theory side of things, the easier it will be to contextualize and implement these skills(especially the more neuroscience relevant ones).
Before giving a brief overview of what else is involved in this field, I will give this warning that there will be some basic coding involved. Before you say “yuck coding” and close out of this, let me emphasize that it is not hard and is really just some of the very basics that you need. You do not need to be the next Zuckerberg(nor do I think you would want to be), but you do need to know how to get to the files that have your data(and you get to type in the terminal so everyone in public will think you’re some professional hacker).
The start of this section is going to cover some basic concepts of how we save neuroimaging data and organize it. Then, it will get into some basic information about what neuroimaging data is and how we analyze it. Finally, after battling through those admittedly not-so-fun fundamental skills, there will be parts that will teach you how to actually analyze this data yourself with a few different programs.
After going through these modules, you will be able to work under the supervision of a more experienced researcher to contribute to/conduct an experiment together. It is important to remember that despite all of this newly acquired knowedge, you will still not be running experiments completely independently(otherwise I would be giving grad schools a run for their money). Rather, this is the start of a lifelong learning process thath