MS Biostats/stats VS MS Bioinformatics VS MS Accountancy (Life is on the line)

Graduate School
1

<p>My career is on the line at this moment. I am going into my junior year at a private LAC and I will be graduating by the end of my fourth year with an Applied Math major (statistics) and a Biology/Economics double minor. </p>

<p>I really don't know what I want to do, I just want a stable career. I started out as Biology/ Pre-med but then I realized I don't want to deal with the stress and debt of medical school. After I graduate, I will be swamped with debt (around 58-60k). </p>

<p>So I have three choices. I was planning on attending my state school branch campus for my masters since it would be cheaper and maybe even funded and I would be living with my parents since the campus is only 30 min away. </p>

<ol>
<li>Take prereqs for the 1 year Accounting masters program during summers before I graduate. </li>
</ol>

<p>Get a job as a bank teller to help pay off loans. Study for CPA exam and apply for certification after receiving Masters in Accounting.</p>

<p>Get a job as an accountant or work for a Big 4 (not really sure what this means, but I hear people talk about it all the time and it seems like the end goal of a CPA)</p>

<ol>
<li>Apply for MS in Biostatistics or Statistics (not sure which one would give me better job opportunities). Get a job as a bank teller, work and go to school.</li>
</ol>

<p>Graduate with MS in Biostatistics or Statistics. </p>

<p>Get a job as a statistician for a drug company or any job that might require a statistician.</p>

<ol>
<li>Apply for an MS in Bioinformatics. Complete necessary computer science courses with the basis of conditional admission (I have not taken a single computer science course so I would have to take these during the summer at my local CC).</li>
</ol>

<p>Get a job as a bank teller and go to school.</p>

<p>Graduate with an MS in Bioinformatics. </p>

<p>Get a job at some company crunching numbers and such or any job that relates to Bioinformatics.</p>

<ol>
<li>Graduate from college, but don't go to grad school. </li>
</ol>

<p>Stay with parents, get a job as a bank teller, and work until all debts are paid (5 or 6 years) or most of them.</p>

<p>Then go to grad school (options 1,2, or 3).</p>

<ol>
<li>Graduate from college. Move out and leave parents (I seriously can't stand living with my parents because they want to control my life. They won't even let me hang out with my friends for more than an hour and my curfew is supposedly 9 o clock but they get mad if I'm out later than 7, saying that it's late).</li>
</ol>

<p>Get a job as a bank teller. Get an apartment with a friend. Work for 10 years in order to pay off debts. Live near poverty level only paying off loans, apartment fees, and food. Then go to graduate school.</p>

<p>Ok so those are my options. Here are my questions:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>What option should I choose and why?</p></li>
<li><p>What is the job market looking like for each of the fields I mentioned? Which one has the best job prospects?</p></li>
<li><p>Recommendations.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>PS I want a job as a bank teller if I'm going to be working to pay off my loans because they make decent money($9/hr) and the jobs aren't hard to come by. Also, my major will be attractive to the employers.</p>

<ol>
<li>Also, is IUPUI a good school to get my masters? It's a branch of IU-Bloomington. Does it even matter where I get my masters if I'm trying to just increase my job prospects and have a low-cost tuition or possibly none at all for grad school?</li>
</ol>

2

<p>IUPUI is not a “branch” of IU-Bloomington, except perhaps in the most technical of administrative senses. It’s a full-fledged university in its own right, and it’s a perfectly good school.</p>

3

<p>Oh I see. I just considered it a branch since there are other IU locations, but IUPUI does seem to be a heavily research based university.</p>

<p>Anyways, I think I’m going to stick to iupui since you said its a good school. It’s my cheapest option especially if I get stipends.</p>

<p>What option should I go with??</p>

4

<p>No one can make that decision for you. It really depends on your interests. However, if you have no CS background, you should at least take some of the prerequisites before applying to a bioinformatics program. Didn’t you have to take programming-type classes as part of your applied math major? Is it something you like doing?</p>

5

<p>TBQH, computer science does not interest me at all. I’m way more interested in statistics. I just want a reliable career.</p>

<p>As an applied math major, I don’t have to take CS classes. It is recommended since I’m concentrating in statistics, but since I’m switching majors half way into college I wouldn’t be able to fit any CS classes unless I took them over the summer. That’s why if I got into a Bioinformatics MS program, I would have to take CS classes before I actually start the program itself.</p>

6

<p>If you don’t know what you want to do, why don’t you just get a job and work for a while while you figure it out?</p>

<p>What are you interested in? Personally, I am biased because I work in public health. There is tremendous demand for biostatisticians, which is why I plan to go back and get a master’s in statistics or biostatistics to add to my PhD in public health (social and behavioral sciences). I want to do research within biostatistics, but apply it to social research within public health.</p>

<p>All three of those career fields are stable ones with more demand than supply. I know that bioinformatics, in particular, is really exploding. But if you have no interest in computer science, why make yourself study CS just to go into bioinformatics? Statistics is also a lucrative career. Statistics is also blowing up as businesses (including hospitals and pharmaceutical companies) find new ways to obtain data from their consumers/patients. Biostatisticians also have pretty good salaries. Neither is necessarily better; some straight statistics programs offer classes in biostatistics, but a biostatistics degree will probably prepare you better for clinical trials and the kinds of problems that health scientists are interested in. Statistics degrees are more generalized, but have applications in a lot of industries. (Another option, if you like stats, is operations research - which combines statistics with business classes to enable statisticians to optimize businesses.)</p>

<p>Another thing: many statistics jobs want some kind of work experience. So if you could get a few years of experience as an analyst (why are you so set on a bank teller job? You have a degree in one of the most employable fields - applied math. Go find a math job! Visit the Career Center of the American Statistical Association or the American Mathematical Association) AND an MS in statistics/biostatistics or bioinformatics, you’d be very well positioned for great jobs afterwards.</p>

<p>You also don’t have to pay off all your loans before you go back to graduate school, nor do you have to live in poverty. Assuming that your interest is around 8%, you have a monthly payment of about $727/month. With a math bachelor’s degree, I’m guessing you can get a position that pays around $40-45K, which after taxes will look like $38K or $2833/month. Assuming that you don’t live in a very high cost of living area, you could live relatively comfortably on $2,106/month - not rich, of course, but comfortably. I lived on about that much in my first 3 years of graduate school.</p>

<p>And if you apply to some big consulting firms, you could make $50-60K. I have some RAs who are graduating this year and doing data analyst positions at big firms, too. One is going to work at Epic, a company in Madison, WI that has data analyst positions. Look for something like that; it will be so much more useful than working as a bank teller. Again…you have a math degree!</p>

7

<p>Here’s that company’s job listings, btw - they develop software for physicians, clinics, and hospitals. LOTS of jobs for math majors with a BA.</p>

<p>[Epic</a> Careers :: Career Listings](<a href=“http://careers.epic.com/search.php]Epic”>http://careers.epic.com/search.php)</p>

<p>By the way, $9/hour is NOT decent money for a college grad with a degree in applied math. (It’s not really decent money for ANY college grad, or anybody - it’s about 170% of the poverty level for one person, actually.)</p>

8

<p>^^ Thank you so much, that helped a lot.</p>

<p>I was actually looking to become an analyst after college, but I didn’t think I could actually get a job as one. I checked some job listings and I was discouraged to find that most of them asked for experience. </p>

<p>I go to a small LAC. Do you think I should speak with my advisor (who happens to be the department chair of the math department) about possible getting internships and help to prepare myself as an analyst after college and discuss other career options?</p>

<p>To be honest, I thought the bachelor’s degree in general wasn’t enough to land a what i consider to be good job such as an analyst. That’s why I was settling for a bank teller lol… I know like 2 econ majors that are bank tellers. I didn’t think I could become an analyst because I thought the job market was crappy.</p>

<p>I also assumed everyone who wasn’t an engineering major pretty much has to settle for a fast food job after college. That’s the only thing I’m worried about.</p>

<p>EDIT: I looked up a bunch of analyst jobs and they all require experience. How am I supposed to have experience straight out of college and get one of these jobs?</p>