alt Hacker NewsMy 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.
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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.
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.
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 am not sure biology is not a "hard science"?
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.
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].
[0] https://arcinstitute.org/