I'm not in that branch of IT, but I'd say to look at job ads now and research any acronyms/terms you don't know already.

What do you want to do? I am a molecular biologist but I had a comp sci minor in college. I would consider myself more in Genomic/Genetics, but they can really be the same thing as bioinformatics.

Are you undergrad or Grad? Learn Hadoop, R and python. Get into a lab. Start a project mining information in the UCI data mining repository(or something similar). You can select a cool project to work on, then repeat and expand on the work the original authors did. This will get you a working familiarity with the algorithms and problems common to big data in the biological sciences. I could help you pick a set/stuff to do if you wanted. But fuck the dry lab, bench side rules!!

Also, there are some papers involving roundup I'v seen on here that i want to independently verify, I can send you a link to the data if you want to look at it. Couple hundred Mbs I think...

I used to work in a Bioinformatics lab. Depends on what you want to do. We used R, Matlab, Perl, ImageJ, you name it. We also worked on DNA sequencing and similar fields of study. If that's what you are interested in, let me know and I can PM you some more specifics.

It sounds crazy, but: Learn C++. I've been working in the space for most of a decade and my comfort in a high-performance language has been absolutely critical. At the same time learn shell really well, so that you can do rapid prototyping and interactive work. The basic idea is to write small bits that do one thing right, then combine them into general data flow descriptions using shell or other systems.

A colleague of mine has a PhD in bioinformatics, we make mobile apps though.