So I'm probably the oddest person on here in terms of my path to BI.

I did my undergraduate at a state school in Biomedical Engineering(only coding known was MATLAB). Got shanghaied by the department because they marketed the degree as a straight to industry degree. After my year graduated and had issues going to industry they dropped that option.

I spent a year traveling the US/working in an Indian restaurant while I thought long and hard what I wanted to do with my degree/what grad program. Full disclosure I had a low GPA due to issues in freshman year and figuring out how college works which made my graduate education prospects a bit intimidating.

I started this year with a city change to join my GF (medical student). She got an email from a professor to her medical class with summer research info. We sent an email with my resume (sans GPA obviously) which got forwarded to the head of the BI department. They were impressed with the resume enough to give me an interview.

To be perfectly clear I had never heard of BI until I was already in the interview. I nailed the interview and they offered me a full time position as a programmer beginning ASAP. That offer ended up compounding and they offered me a spot in the PhD program while staying full time.

Currently I'm in the process of becoming the metagenomics guy for the department. I work with large scale (4,000+ genome) datasets for pan/core analysis (and other things once our server is running and I can finish the first part -.-)