From another forum.
A MS in Biostats will get you a job. Most MS biostatisticians are paid well and live comfortably. Most jobs are in industry. With an MS, you'll likely be a researcher working as part of a team, lead by a PhD/PhDs... You'll likely get put on projects/told what to do, rather than have control... You'll be programming and interpreting more than anything else
Basically, an MS will give you a comfortable career, but you'll likely never have a top leadership role. If you like programming, interpreting data and working on projects assigned to you, it's a great option. However, if you want to design studies and work on methodology,along with the analysis part, you'll need a Phd. The highest ranks in industry and academia are dominated by PhDs, are without one, you'll probably always work under one
Well, yes, I am one. However, what I wrote stands, it's actually not economically advantageous to be average as a PhD. You're not going into it for the money, the ROI sucks. You're going into it to be the one. I don't want anyone telling me what to do in my professional work (it's fine to tell me what to do, but there's a low tolerance for someone directly interfering in my analysis).
@Jbrl is right, if you are 10% material in CS, it works out pretty great. The dirty secret is that the 10% of pharmacists (and more than that) do quite all right for themselves too. A little work here, a little investing there, a well-put together family with time enough for love...I've never found it that much of a struggle to get into the place where the marginal utility of making more money motivates me, but what worries me is that I'll be prepared to face my decline when it comes and inevitably does, the problem of the Second Act. Some of you are still on the growth curve phase, but what I'm surprised at with many of you is that despite you all being in the 2% or 1%, it's just not enough. I see this with some of my colleagues, and I definitely see it with my wife's partners. Maybe dissatisfaction with success is a key to always getting it, but I find that a sad observation on most of us.
What's really funny though was I just got out of a conversation with the actuaries at White Oak, and their response was they wish they were in healthcare, because could make an individual difference. Actuaries are the only profession that I know that has less formal education that we do, but that the
average (not the superstars) do as well or better than we do and have even better office circumstances.
Actuaries use mathematics, statistics, and financial theory to analyze the economic costs of risk and uncertainty.
www.bls.gov
I had to break their illusions on that matter, but I did say that if they want to help people, join a church or some volunteer organization, don't work in a supposedly helping job as you all know just how often we all "help" people in the way that the public thinks. So it's not just us, it's just the nature of dreaming about a utopia. What makes an actuary's job hard is not the statistics or the forecasts, but the ever pessimistic viewpoint of humanity that calculating those life tables and forecasts make, that you do reduce everyone to a number eventually, and that with the right distributions, your end is always the same.
But if you want to be an actuary, there's a long period of informal education, and there is a long period of playing the game at insurance companies, consultancies, and the government in order to get the experience needed to sign off on matters. But when you do, the probability that your life will turn out fine is then up to you and not circumstance. They grumble, but they aren't starving, but they keep dreaming because it'll never be enough.
For now, any pharmacist at 10+ years is in that category, that it's more up to you than circumstance about success. And those new grads, they can't be helped,
but I'm getting sick and tired of being lectured by people who don't work at all about supposed issues with the work I do and we do competently day in and day out, even when we do grumble. The career of pharmacy and most professions is not to do the job well, that's so basic that it shouldn't need to be stated, but to survive long enough to do the job at all. Day in and day out in Walgreens or anywhere else, performing in a job that is stressful, unrewarding from the service standpoint, for people who just don't care is why we make the big bucks.
