View Single Post
Old 01-26-2011, 01:14 PM   #4
ChinoCoug
Senior Member
 
ChinoCoug's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: NOVA
Posts: 3,005
ChinoCoug is an unknown quantity at this point
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeWaters View Post
You're not too old...but it may not be the best idea.

5 or 6 years to get your PhD. Then 1 or 2 post-docs. Then a real grind after that as well trying to get your career going and get tenure (you are not going to study poverty and brain development in the private sector).

Brain development of humans? Or animals?

Using tissue? Or scans?

I'm assuming you would be doing humans/scans. In that case, probably the more appropriate field is psychology (PhD). or psychiatry (MD). One advantage of the psychology degree would be the opportunity to be clinical, as an additional career option.

With your math background, maybe you are more interested in epidemiology and health services research....that's another thing to look into, and can be approached from a number of different fields/directions.

A main reason I wanted to go into science was because I didn't like running regressions on large datasets with lots of noise and I wanted the greater certainty from testing stuff in a lab. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in public health I'd be dealing with the same degree of uncertainty as in the social sciences.

I was imagining doing both testing on animals (with implications for humans) and fMRIs on humans.
__________________
太初有道
ChinoCoug is offline   Reply With Quote