Ungraded assignment: Create a GitHub account

Week 4 (deadline: by Thursday’s lecture)

Author
Affiliation

Jelmer Poelstra

CFAES Bioinformatics Core, Ohio State University

Published

September 12, 2025

Before you start

By the start of this week’s Thursday lecture, you should make sure you have access to a personal GitHub account. For most of you, that will mean you need to create an account, as detailed below.

GitHub is a website that hosts Git repositories, i.e. version-controlled projects. In this week of the course, you’ll learn how to use Git together with GitHub.

Detailed steps

If you already have a GitHub account, log in and start at step 6.

  1. Go to https://github.com.

  2. Click the “Sign Up” button all the way in the top right corner of the page.

  3. Fill out the form (don’t use “Continue with Google”) to provide your personal details – some notes:

    • When choosing your username, I recommend to keep it professional and make it include or resemble your real name. (Keep in mind that you may use GitHub to share your code, like when publishing a paper.)

    • It’s up to you whether you prefer to use your OSU email address or a non-institutional email address – but is should match the email address in your Git configuration (Also note that you can always associate a second email address with your account.).

  4. Check your email and click the link to verify your email address.

  1. You should now be back on the GitHub website, logged in. In the far top-right corner of the page, click your randomly assigned “avatar” (see image on right), and in the dropdown menu, click “Settings”.

  1. In the “Public profile” tab, enter your name.

  2. Optional: Still in the “Profile tab”, upload a Profile picture. This can be a picture of yourself but if you prefer, you can use something else.

  3. Send your GitHub username to Jelmer.

Back to top