Seconded. As you grow older you may find that you actually did lift some of the subjects to a "marketable level". For example, I'm now 40, studied molecular biology but my dedication to my home server, HN and tech podcasts is now paying dividends because I can talk with the big boys about infra-as-code, higher level system architecture and software development. This is really nice as the healthcare company I work for is transforming more towards IT and away from the lab. It also helps me in talking to oncology professionals about their IT woes.
But my formal education always payed the bills and I did enjoy it (although I really wanted to move away from the lab and for as long as I can remember I enjoyed the data analysis parts more than the cell-culture/lab parts. I can still remember starting where I work now, 12 years ago, and saying: I want to get out of the lab! And my manager back then replying: But you have been educated and hired to be in the lab, start there, we'll see where it goes...).
Yes I like philosophy, economics, politics and math too, but I'll leave that for birthdays and late nights at conferences, keep it at the cocktail level so to speak (and watch some Stand-up Maths and 3Blue1Brown, read some Yuval Noah Harari).
One has to specialize in some things to make money. I always tell my kids: You need to learn a trick that your are better at than others so someone will pay you to do it. Then you can pay others to do things you find boring or difficult. Of course you want to focus on something you find fun. If they get older I'd recommend them to keep consciously thinking about what gives them energy and what drains it. It's what my career coaches always told me (I was fortunate enough to work at a company that supplied coaches to everyone). Is it really more complex than that?
My tip would be to look for a company where you get the opportunity to "transform" (a large company's research department for example?), and then to sometimes just give it a year when you don't like your current position. Talk to people, go to conferences, try to learn if there is work out there with the right balance of old vs new for you.
What a great answer! I have similar questions as OP in my head. Would like to have a return-on-investment on my following of technical or philisophical blogs or reading books about it. Or on what I learned about my Arduino hobby projects. But my formal education combined with practical experiences is the trick that pays the bills, even though it is often hard or boring. The rest of knowledge makes great conversations at the coffee machine or at a party.
Evolutionary biology as a profession is probably difficult to be a bill payer, it's afaik exclusively an academic exercise. Sure they need IT people (for bioinformatics, genome informatics, data science, etc) but you are almost 100% certain to be entering the academic "rat race". Which can be nice, if you're into it.
You could make a start by offering your IT skills to an evolutionary biology professor? Why not invite yourself for a coffee? Biology is IT-ifying at a very rapid pace (I sequenced 200 basepairs in one experiment in 2003, last week we did 120.000.000.000 on our midrange NG sequencer, the human brain is pretty useless in dealing with that raw data.)
Oncology has aspects of evolutionary biology, every tumor is in a mini evolutionary arms race with the host and its defenses, and Hospital Informatics is booming. It's an interoperability mess, they are struggling to "unlock their own data", let alone collaborate effectively. People with the right skills and fitting interests (like evolutionary biology) are really needed. But target the research side of things, or you end up what we sometimes call a "data plumber", you're just struggling to bring data from many legacy systems together when the professor or MD/PhD student asks for it... I heard from Data Scientists that are lured in and realize they are employed as Data Engineers. Which can be nice, if you're into it. But it's far away from biology. You could also go for healthcare companies like Illumina, Roche, Sophia Genetics, Philips, Siemens, etc. They all have hospitals as customers.
Anyway, I guess once you in the right environment you can start to move in small steps towards preferred positions, say you start as a data engineer but work your way up the IT chain and soon you're talking to Oncology professionals trying to understand their problems. But give yourself 5-10 years I'd say, it's not something you can do fast, you have to prove yourself at every little step.
Thanks for the thoughtful response! But I'm actually not interested in the computational side of biology, it might be a way in but I really don't find IT interesting, it just happen to be very lucrative, so as soon as I can I want to escape.
Academia is where I want to end up actually, planning to pivot when I can afford it. Not too far off now!
Cool, biology is a very nice field to be in, good luck! Beware of the "guy that can fix the printer"-label (happened to me), just play dumb, don't let them know you're good with computers ;)
But my formal education always payed the bills and I did enjoy it (although I really wanted to move away from the lab and for as long as I can remember I enjoyed the data analysis parts more than the cell-culture/lab parts. I can still remember starting where I work now, 12 years ago, and saying: I want to get out of the lab! And my manager back then replying: But you have been educated and hired to be in the lab, start there, we'll see where it goes...).
Yes I like philosophy, economics, politics and math too, but I'll leave that for birthdays and late nights at conferences, keep it at the cocktail level so to speak (and watch some Stand-up Maths and 3Blue1Brown, read some Yuval Noah Harari).
One has to specialize in some things to make money. I always tell my kids: You need to learn a trick that your are better at than others so someone will pay you to do it. Then you can pay others to do things you find boring or difficult. Of course you want to focus on something you find fun. If they get older I'd recommend them to keep consciously thinking about what gives them energy and what drains it. It's what my career coaches always told me (I was fortunate enough to work at a company that supplied coaches to everyone). Is it really more complex than that?
My tip would be to look for a company where you get the opportunity to "transform" (a large company's research department for example?), and then to sometimes just give it a year when you don't like your current position. Talk to people, go to conferences, try to learn if there is work out there with the right balance of old vs new for you.