Biology Major Worried About Job Prospects

College Majors
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Hi, I just made this account to ask this question.

So when I applied to college, I wanted to go in under Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, but I started reading the job prospects for it and it scared the crap out of me. I then thought, well maybe I can grow to like engineering so I switched my major to Biosystems Engineering. When I got to my university, I took introduction to Biosystems and intro to engineering design and I absolutely hated them both. The projects were really boring in both classes and the alumni who came in to speak sounded like they did mundane office work. I grinned and bared it for about two months, but I realized that I shouldn’t hate the work that I am doing this much.

(I took intro to engineering design during my sophomore year of high school and I hated it back then too… I thought maybe my mind would change… well it didn’t.) I took 1 programming class in high school and didn’t like it…

So I switched back to Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. I’ve wanted to study this area of biology ever since I was 12. (At 12, I contracted an auto immune disorder which sparked my interest in genetics. Later that year, when I learned genetics in school for the first time, I realized that this was what I wanted to spend my life doing.) If I am going to be honest, nothing else really excites me like biology does.

I don’t think I am competitive enough to make it to medical school, nor do I have any interest in heading in that direction. I believe that a doctor should look forward to interacting with their patients and helping them, the idea of doing that kind of annoys me to be quite honest. I get super sick of explaining my disorder to my mother for the 45th time because she still doesn’t know how it works. I’m fine when I interact with other people who have background knowledge, but I don’t want to work with the general public. I’d be perfectly content working alone in a lab all day, but that’s not realistic. I’m okay with climbing the management ladder a little bit, but I don’t want my job to be 95% paperwork/computer work.

I don’t hate math, but I don’t really love it either. I’m willing to take more math courses, but a math minor at my school is around 30 credits. I’m honestly not sure what I want to go to graduate school in, so I don’t I should take courses in all one subject. My school doesn’t have a bio/chem/physics minor.

If I were to leave biology, then what would I even do with my life? I cannot see myself doing anything else. I’m not money hungry, but I’d like to be middle class after and not struggling by the time I hit my 30’s. I wouldn’t mind starting around $38,000 and climbing to the mid 60’s mid career.

Considering graduate school in: Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, Microbiology/Molecular Genetics, PathA, Medical Lab Science
Knocked Out Graduate School in: Genetic Counseling, Teaching, Biomedical Engineering
Interested in the following industries: Water treatment, food safety, pharmaceuticals, biotech, forensic biology…

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Does you school have a Computational Biology/Bioinformatics track? Or take enough classes for a CompSci minor.

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No Computational Biology major (it’s a graduate school major though), but I could try some CS courses. Just looked into it and the two intro programming courses are selective for my major, so the minor would be small.

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If you’re happy starting in the mid-$30K range and just want to make a middle class salary in the mid-$60K range mid-career, you’ll be perfectly fine. Biology majors don’t have high unemployment rates; they’re in around the same range as computer science majors and economics majors, honestly. They just tend not to make a whole lot of money - but they do make about what you’re looking for.

There are many jobs you can get in the fields you listed with a bachelor’s degree, and then you can plan whether you need a graduate degree or not later. Public health (so epidemiology or biostatistics, or bioinformatics) is a great choice for the fields of your interest. If you are interested in those, make sure that you take some math/stats classes (and in the case of bioinformatics, some CS classes as well). There’s also an MPH in environmental health sciences, or another degree in environmental health and sciences. I have a friend who works with water treatment and safety in Southeast Asia and she got an MPH I believe in environmental health sciences with a focus on water.

You don’t have to formally minor in something to take classes in it, so even if your school doesn’t have a chem minor, if you’re interested in water or food safety or pharma/biotech, a few classes in chemistry will be useful.

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5

If you’re willing to invest the time, pharmacy school. You can make six figures. Many career paths outside of retail pharmacy, good job security, and future demand.

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I see jobs listed for bio grads at the coroner’s all the time. That might be an interesting path.

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