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I'm a student. I was going to post in the academic advice thread, but a poster suggested I bring my questions here. Preface: I live in South America. I'm fairly young, in my early twenties, and a little clueless I guess about what life will probably be like after I've graduated. I decided to switch from Biology to CE and took a gap year to buckle down and get my poo poo together, and also to get myself up to an adequate level of math to start myself on my path. (Hopefully this was a good choice) I've been doing a good chunk of the Stitz Zeagler precalculus book to refresh basic math, then the Coursera Calculus course. Overall, I'm trying to follow this layout of online CS courses I found, to supplement or at least prepare me for actual university next year. As someone with no prior programming experience whatsoever, I found myself really drained by CS50. After the first three weeks, I felt I wasn't retaining information properly so I did them again and they felt quite easy. Then the problem sets for the fourth week and fifth week became very trying for me. I feel like I understand a lot of the concepts, but when it comes time to translate that into a program, I've had a hard time and it's made me want to take a break and focus on math before I come back with a different mentality. I've been feeling kind of anxious about whether or not I'm not grokking something that so many other students seem to be able to, I guess? And wondering/hoping that it's just the high standards set by a Harvard-sponsored course that are challenging me so much, and not some kind of natural lack of talent for programming. I guess I just want to know if anyone went through a similar phase. I looked at that FizzBuzz thing someone linked on this thread or the Academic Advice one and found I could resolve it even with the basic knowledge I have from a few weeks of CS50, and that made me feel that maybe I'm just overthinking Tosk fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Oct 24, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 00:47
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I did my undergrad in biology and was planning to go into bioinformatics (for a period I thought this was much more of a hybrid field between biology and comp sci than it is in practice). I have since decided that academia is not where I want to be and have started doing the programming courses from my local university's computer engineering program to build more practical skills. I've really enjoyed the courses I'm doing and a few more computational projects I managed to do during my biology undergrad with Python and R and can tell abandoning academia is the way to go. Eventually I would like to leverage my bio degree and go into more of a data science field but I am enjoying learning the fundamentals and making my way there slowly. I'm 26 if that's in any way pertinent to any advice I might receive. My current job is fine, but not at all related to IT and I'd like to start building up a resume while I continue my education. I want to get an entry level job in IT as soon as possible in literally any area. It seems like webdev is an accessible field for people with little experience, but most of my classes have used C++ and I have no experience in Javascript, React, etc. I'm in LatAm so I'm not expecting very specific advice, generally I'd just like to know: what is the minimum level of knowledge to be able to competently execute the kind of tasks I could expect to encounter in a basic entry-level webdev job? What should I be doing alongside my basic university programming courses? Googling this kind of thing turns up advice like "do projects and build a portfolio" but I'm not even sure where to begin with that.
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Mar 7, 2023 22:35
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I enjoy the data side of science, and working with and interpreting that data. Like I mentioned, my favorite parts of my biology degree were projects in Python and R, albeit that was just data analysis and some very basic machine learning linear regression stuff. I've just reached the conclusion that academia itself is a trap I have no interest in. I know that pure bioinformatics shouldn't imply wetlab but I'm under the impression that a lot of positions imply some amount of laboratory work and I don't think I would enjoy it on a day to day basis. Honestly, I just realized that I really enjoyed programming from my limited exposure to it and the work/life balance seems a lot better than it does in science for the most part, and I've been enjoying my coursework pretty enthusiastically. I haven't discarded the idea of pursuing an MSc in Bioinformatics though as opposed to, for example, completing the computer engineering degree I've done a little over a year of, but I would want to go into "industry" with it and I'm not sure what that would look like as opposed to data science.
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Mar 7, 2023 23:59
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I'm also trying a career change. University is public where I live so as I work I'm slowly going through a computer engineering degree, which had always been my plan b before I went into academia and noped out after finishing my degree. (I'm 26) That has been great for logic, algos and data structures, although I'm still probably 1-1.5 years from being at the ideal "employable" point in the degree (most entry level stuff here is directed at "advanced students" of CS-related degree programs and whatnot), but my courses are clearly not concerned with preparing me for what I'll be doing on a daily basis or for what development-type work involves. So I'm trying to also work on the Odin Project and some udemy courses I bought on React, Node.js and JavaScript. The idea is to bring a github online with a few basic projects and hopefully with that manage to get something (acknowledging that jr. hiring is poo poo worldwide at the moment). I've posted about this a few times throughout the forum (I think I've probably asked in threads like these at every step from "I'm not sure if I want to do a PhD" to "How do I get literally any IT job as fast as possible") but a few posts up the discussion on programming vs frontend made me want to ask for any more specific advice. Like should I also be grinding certs right now or is that something I should do later on once I have a github I can present on a resume? Like Hadlock mentioned, I basically would like to start in frontend and continue to educate myself and see if I would rather be doing more backend, engineering-type work. I was in a molecular biology lab doing bioinformatics stuff on cancer patient datasets basically using Python and R for my undergrad, and did a basic but funded machine learning project with engineering students during the pandemic as well and it would be cool to leverage a mixed background in biology and computer science at some point in the future, but right now I'd be happy with any soulless entry level development job Tosk fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Jan 10, 2024 |
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Jan 10, 2024 20:30
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