>> Are thinking of getting a BS, MS, or PhD? <<

BS for now. In computers too much education counts against you. Is microbiology different?


If you want to do research, you are going to need a Ph.D. The mentality is different than in IT. It's harder to get a job with just a BS. Getting into research requires alot of education, preferably in one of the big research universities, and a strong publication record. You don't get these unless you go onto a Ph.D./postdoc tract.

One thing you should be aware of is almost all biology fields have really low salary scales compared other sciences, engineering, and CS. When I was at LLNL, I was working on a collaborative computational biology project composed of computer scientists, physicists, chemists, and biologiest. We pretty much shared equally in the work; computer scientists were doing biology and biologist were writing code. I later got a hold of the salaries for the group - they're public - and found out the biologists were paid slightly over half of what the computer scientists and physicists were making simply because of their title. This is endemic throughout the industry. The only exceptions to this salary imbalance, AFAIK, are for bioinformatic programmers (see below) and gene therapy researchers with PhDs or MDs.



>> Do you want to be a lab tech or do independent research? <<

I would rather automate lab work or automate research somehow. I don't want to be a lab factory grunt though. I like to automate repetitious tasks, not perform them for the most part.


Do you mean like robotics or something along the lines of pure software developement (e.g. data mining/warehousing)? If it's the former you probably are going to want to go more towards engineering with an emphasis in biology (I think UC Berkeley has such a program, probably other schools too).

If it's the latter, you should look towards the field of bioinformatics, the application of CS to problems in genome analysis. Most people who get into this are biology types that move over to CS. Real software engineers who can work on large scale projects in this field are hard to come by so you may be able to get in without going a full 4 years of school because of the skill shortage. A biology/genetics crash course may be sufficient to get an entry level job. Check around at local universities. In the SF Bay Area, Stanford and UC Berkeley offer crash courses and certification in this field. If you are curious to see what employers are looking for, take a look at companies like Incyte, Celera, or Genetech, or look at the job listings on [link|http://www.biospace.com| Biospace ].

Now before you jump right in, you should be aware that virtually all bioinformatics work is done in Java or OO Perl (take a look at [link|http://www.bioperl.org|BioPerl]).