Educational dilemma/pickle

[tanner]

Good evening almal

So I did my undergrad in biochemistry/genetics and my honours this year in bioinformatics. Through my bioinformatics project I fell in love with coding. Now I am on track to do an MSc next year, although nothing is finalized like registration etc. My question is: to learn coding and software development, should I go back and do a computer science degree (most likely through UNISA), something like a bootcamp (hyperiondev, wethinkcode etc) or self learn and do industry certs (AWS, MICROSOFT ASURE, CISCO etc)?

I don’t buy into the promises of a ‘high starting salary’ nor am I really after a large starting salary. I just want to learn and be employable.

Any insights will be appreciated.

 

[cguy]

I would recommend a CS degree over boot camps any day. It is however a little less clear given that you already have an honours degree (I assume you did one or two years of maths there?).

What type of coding do you want to do? With your background, areas such as HPC for things such as molecular dynamics, protein folding, etc. may be on the cards?

It may be sufficient to catch up on the CS background yourself and do an MSc in computational biology to solidify your coding skills.

 

[Charly]

Good evening almal

So I did my undergrad in biochemistry/genetics and my honours this year in bioinformatics. Through my bioinformatics project I fell in love with coding. Now I am on track to do an MSc next year, although nothing is finalized like registration etc. My question is: to learn coding and software development, should I go back and do a computer science degree (most likely through UNISA), something like a bootcamp (hyperiondev, wethinkcode etc) or self learn and do industry certs (AWS, MICROSOFT ASURE, CISCO etc)?

I don’t buy into the promises of a ‘high starting salary’ nor am I really after a large starting salary. I just want to learn and be employable.

Any insights will be appreciated.

Are you looking to go in the direction of what you already know?

Regardless of what your next move is, start teaching yourself and build up your portfolio. There's so much great free/cheap information on the internet that there's no excuse not to start now.

 

[tanner]

Are you looking to go in the direction of what you already know?

Regardless of what your next move is, start teaching yourself and build up your portfolio. There's so much great free/cheap information on the internet that there's no excuse not to start now.

Yeah so I've been learning Python as a taster and its been fun. Have some experience in R but thats mainly statistical analysis.

 

[Charly]

Is there something specific you're interested in?

 

[tanner]

I would recommend a CS degree over boot camps any day. It is however a little less clear given that you already have an honours degree (I assume you did one or two years of maths there?).

What type of coding do you want to do? With your background, areas such as HPC for things such as molecular dynamics, protein folding, etc. may be on the cards?

It may be sufficient to catch up on the CS background yourself and do an MSc in computational biology to solidify your coding skills.

So my whole schtick was that I would use my two years in my MSc to learn more programming and computing and then do some certifications (although IDK if the certs are worth anything). What I am afraid of is: what if all along I should have gone the bootcamp route and not wasted my time with the MSc?

 

[tanner]

Is there something specific you're interested in?

I have't tasted enough to really know but I know I just love scripting and getting an outcome so really anything involving that (which is 99% of coding fields I know) would interest me.

 

[Charly]

I have't tasted enough to really know but I know I just love scripting and getting an outcome so really anything involving that would interest me,

Okay so you're not specifically looking for a clean break from the industry you're familiar with but you're open to that possibility?

If you're keen, PM me your Discord or Google Meets details so that I can share a bit about what's worked for me.

 

[Agent67]

Good evening almal

So I did my undergrad in biochemistry/genetics and my honours this year in bioinformatics. Through my bioinformatics project I fell in love with coding. Now I am on track to do an MSc next year, although nothing is finalized like registration etc. My question is: to learn coding and software development, should I go back and do a computer science degree (most likely through UNISA), something like a bootcamp (hyperiondev, wethinkcode etc) or self learn and do industry certs (AWS, MICROSOFT ASURE, CISCO etc)?

I don’t buy into the promises of a ‘high starting salary’ nor am I really after a large starting salary. I just want to learn and be employable.

Any insights will be appreciated.

Hey man, so while I'm still a relative beginner in this field, I can give you some tips regarding figuring out where to go and how to learn.

Firstly, find what field in coding you want to go into, poke around the web and find a field you like (There's many to choose from. AI, Data Science, Web Development, standard software development, etc). Seeing that biochemistry, etc is your thing, maybe Data Science should be a good fit for you (but then again it might not be)? In essence, take a look around and find a field you're interested in.

Secondly, take an intro to computer science course to learn the basic theory and learn some languages along the way and to also make sure if this is the type of career you want to go into, there are many great free courses out there (check out Coursera, edX, Udemy and freeCodeCamp), but I personally recommend CS50: Introduction to Computer Science by Harvard hosted on edX to get the basics down first (It's free to take and complete, you receive a certificate at the end. But you can also pay to get a verified cert to show to employers). Here's a quote from a post I made about CS50 in another thread:

For starters, this is on par with a first-year university course, seriously, CS50 doesn't pull any punches, to complete newcomers in Comp Sci it might be a bit of a challenge. There are Lectures and Notes, available in each week's syllabus, then there's the most renowned part of the course, the Problem Sets or as I called them "this week's homework". While the Lectures and Notes can help you mostly with each week's problem set, you will come across problems that you have to Google or ask questions about on the community Discord. And if I'm truly honest if you can master C/get C down along with Algorithms and Data Structures then Python (which you will also learn later on in the course) will be a breeze along with JavaScript (whose basic syntax is C-like) and SQL. The homework can be difficult regardless if you choose more comfortable or less comfortable (yes, in most problem sets you can pick what difficulty-level problem you want to do, you could even do both if you feel masochistic).

But finishing the problem sets, especially after struggling with them, is the best feeling ever and very rewarding.
You will learn quite a lot about yourself and about the topic too. The head lecturer, David Malan, is one of the best teachers you will ever see (coming from a guy who didn't have the best teachers in high school).

I would recommend freeCodeCamp too for more in-depth stuff about Web Development and Data Science/ML. You can also practice your programming skills on LeetCode and freeCodeCamp has practice questions that you could also try out.

Lastly, if you've done all of the above and you're completely sure you want to go into programming/coding and change career paths, then you can go for the formal qualification. Considering UNISA you have three options:

• Diploma in IT (I'm starting with it next year and I would recommend it if you're hesitant about the two degrees I'll mention below, it's more an all-rounder considering the volume of CS topics to others)
• Bachelor in Computing (curriculum is more skewed towards Maths-related topics)
• Bachelor in Informatics (curriculum is more skewed towards Business-related topics)

Here's a list of links that should help you out more about UNISA and other qualms:

• Diploma in IT's curriculum
• Informatics degree's curriculum
• Computing degree's curriculum
• https://mybroadband.co.za/forum/threads/need-guidance-in-studying-it-cs-at-unisa.1151612/
• https://mybroadband.co.za/forum/thr...istance-learning-2-electric-boogaloo.1132063/
• Thread by someone else who wants to go into comp sci

I hope this post helps you in some way shape or form

 

[NarrowBandFtw]

my 2c ... if your intent is a profession rather than research / academics, a Master's degree of any kind is a giant waste of both time and money

armed with a degree of some description plus a couple of industry certs you should manage to find a coding job and from there on it will be on the job experience that counts, that is the last time anyone will care about your degree

 

[cguy]

my 2c ... if your intent is a profession rather than research / academics, a Master's degree of any kind is a giant waste of both time and money

armed with a degree of some description plus a couple of industry certs you should manage to find a coding job and from there on it will be on the job experience that counts, that is the last time anyone will care about your degree

For the OP: If your goal is to shift gears completely, and become a typical front-end, or full-stack developer, then I agree with the above - do some certifications and just get some experience.

If you want to work more on the high end of technology, or want to exploit your training thus far and move into computational bio-technology, then the above is a rather polarized view of things.

There are many professions that value the research skill set and even domain knowledge acquired in a Masters and even PhD degrees. These are also very useful for securing sponsorships and visas for overseas relocation.

The type of experience one can get with and without these qualifications is also radically different from day 1, which can set the trajectory for the rest of one’s career.

Almost everyone I have worked with in my (approaching 25 year) career has had an MSc and/or PhD.

 

[Johnatan56]

my 2c ... if your intent is a profession rather than research / academics, a Master's degree of any kind is a giant waste of both time and money

armed with a degree of some description plus a couple of industry certs you should manage to find a coding job and from there on it will be on the job experience that counts, that is the last time anyone will care about your degree

Like cguy said, kind of nonsense, it completely depends on where you want to end up.

You can still manage to get most places without a Masters/PhD, but it will be a lot more difficult.

If you want to be a normal web dev or something like that, masters (and I would argue even a degree, though might need dip/Bsc to get in) is overkill, if you want to work at most banks and stuff etc., a vast majority of the positions will be hons max needed, but if you want to do things like cguy mentioned, HPC etc., it will require a masters at most places or else you won't even get the interview (there are always exceptions to the rule though, but doubtful).

The work I do right now, the stuff I did in my Btech is definitely useful, and I can say it helped me get up to speed pretty fast since groundwork laid, also allowed me to jump positions because of that, and I would never have known that that door existed had I not had the degree.

In regards to OP, I would not start a Bsc CS, rather do a masters with the topic you're interested in, it will be worth a lot more, study the Bsc CS stuff on the side rather.

 

[slimeball]

Any updates OP? My view is that you don't neccessarily need a CS degree to become a software developer especially if you already have a science degree. I've seen people with art degrees end up as senior dev's so it's all relative. Any degree shows an employer that you are capable of learning. However that's not to say a CS degree isn't worth it, it's just going to cost time and money and it's something you really have to commit to but if you do it will open many doors.

Of course the fastest route is going to be doing a bootcamp/certs and there are many options, as usual google is your friend. I've recently learned about wethinkcode and i've seen a lot of degree holders opt for that course and their work placement policy means that you 'theoretically' end up with a job at the end of the course. Just make sure you attend a reputable bootcamp so you're not throwing away money.