My fork in the road with hard tech hard science versus biology was in high school. It seemed that students that wanted to become doctors took AP biology and students that wanted to be engineers took physics and chemistry. I had wanted to be an engineer since I was 12 years old so I felt the decision was already made. But all studying neural networks in college in the 80s I realized that there was this tremendously rich ___domain of real neurons which I knew nothing about. I worked as a software engineer for a couple years after graduating but then went back to school to study Neurophysiology. I did not pursue it as my area of work or research, but I am grateful for having had the opportunity to look at the world from the perspective of a biologist.
If you're an engineer and early in your career and feel there's something missing from your intellectual space, I encourage you to go back and get a graduate degree in something totally different. Humans live a very long time so don't feel like you're wasting time.
I've been programming since I was eight, but truly fell in love with biology in 12th grade chemistry: the first introduction to organic chemistry and biochemistry. It was the first time I truly started grokking the application of systems-level thinking to the biological world; how do trees "know" to turn red in the autumn? How do fetuses assemble themselves from two cells?
I decided to purse a double major in biochemistry and evolutionary biology and it was one of the best decisions I've made in my life. The perspective you gain from understanding all life in terms of both networks and population dynamics of atoms, molecules, cells, tissue, organisms and populations -- and how every layer reflects the layer both underneath and above it in a fractal pattern -- is mind-expanding in a way I think you just don't and can't get designing software systems alone.
I work as a software engineer / founder now, but always reflect wistfully on my time as a biologist. I hope to get back to it some day in some way, and think what the Arc Institute team is doing is inspirational [0].
Has anyone seen content that used this multiscale networking and population dynamics as an instructional approach?
For small example, there was a Princeton(?) coffee-table book which used "everyday" examples to illustrate cell/embryonic organizational techniques - like birds equally spacing themselves along a wire. Or compartmentalization, as a cross-cutting theme from molecules to ecosystems.
I've an odd hobby interest in exploring what science education content might look like, if incentives were vastly different, and massive collaborative ___domain expertise was allocated to crafting insightful powerful rough-quantitative richly-interwoven tapestry.
I would love to do something like this but simply cannot afford it. I think it is good advice but going back to school for a degree one does not plan on utilizing is not as feasible today as it was in the 80's, largely due to the sizeable increase in tuition without reciprocal increases in wages.
In this day and age, you can do this for FREE and on the side, whenever you have time!
There are tons of very well-done professional level video courses on Youtube.
There are more organized courses that only ask you for money for the "extras", like some tests and a certificate, but the main parts, texts and videos, are free.
You could start with a really good teaching professor (Eric Lander, MIT) and his course: https://www.edx.org/learn/biology/massachusetts-institute-of... (the "Audit" track is free, ignore the prices; also ignore the "expires" - this course restarts every few months and has been available in new versions for many years now)
It's very engaging!
There's similar courses for everything in the life sciences, there on edX, on Youtube, many other places.
I feel the true Internet is soooo underutilized by most people! Forget news sites, opinion blogs, or social media. Knowledge is there for the taking, free. Only the organized stuff, where you end up with a certificate costs money, but they usually still provide the actual content for free.
Time and energy are also at a premium in the current economy. Good luck learning biochemistry by watching YouTube videos after 8+h of coding and meetings plus commute plus making dinner plus cleaning up.
Depending on where you live, and what you want to study, you might be able to take a couple courses at the community college in areas of interest without spending a lot of money.
I was paid to get a PhD in Biology, albeit just enough to live on. Most people in PhD programs are, either through being a TA (teacher's assistant) or RA (research assistant). The real financial cost is the opportunity cost of 5-6 years of your life.
Whether or not broad support for training scientists holds up during and after the current administration remains to be seen.
My current tuition is under 500 CAD per class. The opportunity cost of not working full time is the real bulk of the cost of studying in places that have a functional government.
A lot of companies will pay for at least part of whatever college classes you take, without auditing whether or not it would be good for your specific job.
I encourage people to look into it, it's a benefit a lot of people have but don't use and it's leaving money on the table.
I had a job with an education budget listed as benefits.
However, to use it there are constraints:
1. The topic should be related to technologies used by company. Cannot get a Google cloud certification as they are using aws.
2. To get it you need approval by line manager, hr, and director of the office.
3. If it is more than €250 you need to sign up loyalty agreement for a year. Meaning if you will return some amount of you quit.
With all that strings attached it is just a marketing bullshit to attract new hires.
Plus usually the employer wants it to be related to ones job, from their very limited perspective of the world and management decisions. For example I couldn't even take a language course for education vacation, as the employer did not make any use of my language skills.
Can you say more? What kind of company would so such a thing? Maybe I live in a bubble but that's so far outside of what I've seen that it just sounds fantastical.
Ok, both of these comments made me doubt my memory so I just checked and my current employer, a very large consumer company, and the limits of the program are that you get a C or above, and the class is "related" to your job or any job you can get at the company. But I've gotten classes paid for that only tangentially related to my job with no problem. So I concede that you might not get a biology degree as an engineer but my particular company does a lot of different things so my guess is in practice you'd have no problems. I also worked at a now-defunct mid-size startup and a hospital system with similarly loose requirements but I don't have access to their docs anymore.
My company uses guildeducation.com and we can use basically $5k a year (I think, it might be semester), a lot of if it is just individual classes, but there are also some degree programs. I don't know if they preselect which courses are available to us or if we have access to the whole catalog. I suspect it's somewhat curated, because we are a medical company and most of it is medical stuff. There is a CS bachelor's program but last I checked there wasn't an MS CS program.
I would assume most companies with 100+ office workers (essentially big enough for an HR department) usually offer something like this in western countries.
The breakpoint was molecular biology around 1986 with the introduction of PCR. Once that happened, biology went from being alchemy to being science.
I loathed biology as taught prior to that. Once I got a molecular biology course, I thought biology was amazing and wondered "Why the hell did we teach all that other crap?"
Well, that was because the tools we had for biology sucked prior to PCR. My problem was that I recognized that even as a child.
Same. Biology was an elective in high school and I never took it. I took Earth Science (basically introductory geology) and then went into the Chemistry/Physics track (two years of each). Never felt I missed it, last time I had any real biology education was a unit in 8th grade science and I didn't care for it then.
I would love to do this, I just cannot afford it as others have already stated. It's depressing to feel like I spend so much of my life at my day job and yet require it to afford the tiny portion I get left. I wish things were different.
Much, much easier to do when you're young. I was just married so no kids yet. We moved to Toronto so I could attend UT and we treated our stay as an extended honeymoon.
I know. I questioned that word choice, but it's sort of a play on words - as most of the biological things that I ended up doing are soft and squishy :)
If you're an engineer and early in your career and feel there's something missing from your intellectual space, I encourage you to go back and get a graduate degree in something totally different. Humans live a very long time so don't feel like you're wasting time.