Just curious, what kind of freelance work do you do and how do you find clients? I always felt like freelance sites are too saturated for me to make a living out of.
I've done a similar setup, working part time remote doing freelance web development for the last several years. My one paragraph answer:
The book The E-Myth makes the point that people fall into this trap: I've been doing a technical skill as an employee (coding). I could just quit my job and do that skill myself! Problem is once you go out on your own, you have to become the CEO, manager, and coder of your little enterprise.
In short, you have to learn business skills. Specifically, marketing, positioning, negotiation, people skills, etc. The more you know about these the easier freelancing is. Coding chops are absolutely necessary, but not sufficient.
The reason sites like Upwork are saturated and pay low rates is because everyone on there is basically acting like an employee and Upwork is serving as a stand in for the boss. People on Upwork are "PHP developers" and "Wordpress developers" and "Javascript developers". These get commodity prices because in many ways they _are_ commodities. Valuable commodities yes. In demand commodities yes. But commodities nonetheless.
Don't compete on Upwork, build your own pipeline. This will require selecting a target market, going out and actually speaking to them, and finding out what their business problems are. Nobody needs a "Wordpress site". But lots of people need a site to sell their product, market their service, etc.
I'm relatively convinced that any person who can combine competence in programming with competence in sales can do anything they want.
One of my favorite really accessible introductions to this idea of selling something that isn't a commodity is Sean D'Souza's The Brain Audit. Read it in one sitting and then change all the copy on your website to be targeted to solving the client's problems instead of what technologies you know.
Happy to chat with more about this - my email's in my profile. Cheers!
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Instead of storing passwords, Cirege uses magic links/codes and external logins to authenticate your users.
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That is an issue not spezific to this tool. It's an issue with all tools offering "Lost password" features. Nowadays everybody should be able to get personalized mail addresses.
It already is! Cognitive psychology (currently the largest field in psychology) has strong connections with Neuroscience and in many cases Computational Neuroscience, which is just engineering and mathematical modelling of the brain.
How did you transition from a Maths/Programming undergrad to doing medicine? I'm doing Computer engineering and plan to do go into medicine later, any tips?
If I were you: 1) I would go work in a computational biology lab, get some papers out, Cancer research is always a step ahead but there a lot of good projects in Neuroscience too (immunology could also work). Go to the best lab you have around, most PIs know that it is hard to find good programmers because they mostly go to the big tech companies or startups. Make sure you don't do wet lab at this step it is going to be a waste of your time since you will not have time to do anything meaningful. 2) With the papers apply to medicine or preferably to MD/PhD program, if you get into MD/PhD program you will have time to learn some real science too. In any case if you are the ambitious type of person when doing step 1 try not to get stuck working as a bioinformatician: lower salaries than tech although better than biologists, you will hit the ladder cap faster, very few transcend to become leaders and command multidisciplinary groups. Good luck!
Medicine was always my goal, so I decided I'd use my undergrad time as an opportunity to try something else I was always interested in and which could provide me with some radically different perspective compared to the biology/chemistry folks. (And would also serve as a backup if I failed to get into medical school...)
My transition was easy. The required prerequisite college courses for admission to med school (two semesters biology, two physical chemistry, two organic chemistry, two physics, one basic calculus) were more than sufficient to get me through my med school courses. I took a few extras too (anatomy/physiology, molecular biology, and genetics) but I feel those were overkill and might not have been necessary. At least they were fun.
I think the biggest part though was that I sought out some experiences in the medical field. This demonstrated to the admissions committees that my career goals weren't a lark and I knew what I was getting into. I did a 6-week summer mini-med-school camp, shadowed physicians in the ER a couple of times, and volunteered in a medical records department for a semester. When I didn't get into med school the first time, I spent the interim year getting my Certified Nursing Assistant license and working in an assisted living facility and a hospital's locked psychiatric ward. Fun times.
You should work hard in your pre-med courses and get good grades, if you have not already taken them. The same is true for MCATs.
I took Physical Chemistry which I am told is looked at by medical admissions offices and something which standard applicants would have a hard time with but those with math/engineering backgrounds should do well in.
Completely agree (read this after posting my comment above). Having rules about structure & organisation rather than frameworks that would have their own rules seems much more pragmatic.
