Entering edit mode
2.2 years ago
luteabanks
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0
Hello everyone! I need advice from experienced specialists. I'm 33 years old and haven't a bachelor's degree. At the moment, I'm in web development. But I want to study bioinformatics or, to be exact, to study cancer cells how they interact with living organisms. What should I do considering my age? What should I choose for a bachelor's and master's degree? Thanks!
Cancer isn't a simple topic. I would suggest you're going to need a good biological grounding before applying bioinformatics to problems.
You need to walk before you can run. You might be able to take up a part time bachelors in biomedical sciences or cancer biology. It really depends what kind of time you have to dedicate to this (and money).
Yeah, I agree cancer is not an easy topic. I want to study breast cancer perhaps choosing the exact direction in the study can reduce the time for study. Of course, I would like to study as quickly as possible, but qualitatively.
I cannot tell you what to do, but I can tell you what I did. I majored in Computer Science and worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the Animal Science department developing custom software and performing analysis of 16S/metagenomic datasets originating in livestock animals. Then, I enrolled in a Masters program in the Microbiology department working on influenza viruses and then a doctoral program working with livestock animals again. If you're a computer science major with an interest in biology, any lab generating high-throughput sequence data would be happy to have you. Further, they would be happy to teach you the biology stuff. I would think of your age as an asset, not something that precludes entry into the field. I hope this helps and best of luck :)!
I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble, but in my experience this is not the case. Especially the any lab part. When taking people into the lab, one has to balance many different things, including funding, project suitability, training potential, etc. It sounds to me that the OP has no experience either in high-throughput sequence analysis or biology, so both of those would have to be taught. Compared to many students that already know biology and at least some sequence analysis, to me this still sounds like a less likely opportunity than presented in the above post.
Your path looks exactly like what you can do in my case. Thanks for sharing your experience. I had doubts about what to choose in the first, computer science or biomedical science.