Jobs for Biology majors

[nerdyneuron]

Hi,

For biology majors: If you guys could share whether you got Masters or PhD and the job you decided to pursue, that'd be great. Right now, I am unsure if I should just get a Masters or get a PhD (for safety reasons and increase in job opportunities? ). I am still indecisive with this, because I am unsure whether or not I want to stay in academia after a PhD. I'm just curious in knowing the possibilities out there for biology majors, because I'm sure there's more jobs than just ones in academia.

[Minhao]

I'm not very familiar with US job market, but I think jobs also strongly depends on discipline, and wet or dry experiments, like, if you're doing some bioinfo or biostat things then it would be easier to get jobs like data analyst. 

(and I heard consulting accept phd and doesn't care what your major is) 

[BabyScientist]

The 2 most common tracks are industry or academia. Industry being pharmaceutical and biotech companies. In those you could do well with just a bachelors, but a masters and a PhD would increase pay, and a PhD would increase autonomy (depending on the position/company). Depending on the field and what you want, academia could mean professor/principal investigator, or research scientist.

Other than those there are "non traditional" options like science writing, science policy, consulting, etc.

If you're in undergrad currently, I recommend looking for internships that would give you a taste for science application so you can decide what you want. If you want to do something that requires more specialized knowledge that your bio degree didn't get you, consider a masters. If you love research and see yourself doing it fora long time, consider a PhD.

[EVIL GENIUS]

On 1/6/2020 at 6:12 AM, Minhao said:

I'm not very familiar with US job market, but I think jobs also strongly depends on discipline, and wet or dry experiments, like, if you're doing some bioinfo or biostat things then it would be easier to get jobs like data analyst. 

(and I heard consulting accept phd and doesn't care what your major is) 

For consulting. They don't care what you learn, they only care about which university you go. For international, I guess they only consider graduate students from Harvard, MIT and Stanford.

[Boolakanaka]

On 1/7/2020 at 7:20 AM, EVIL GENIUS said:

For consulting. They don't care what you learn, they only care about which university you go. For international, I guess they only consider graduate students from Harvard, MIT and Stanford.

Not true. There are a host of schools they would look at, how do I know, I was a principal at Boston Consulting, and D has a PhD in computational biology. By way of specific example, Duke, Yale, Michigan, CAL, CMU, UCLA, UCSD...etc

[mmsseeff]

Networking is often a big factor and not just the school you go to. It just happens that top schools (or rather, top programs) are often great for networking.