If I were to take a stab - it doesn't seem like you understand your value proposition or your competitive edge. It also seems like you're heavily, perhaps myopically, focused on the immediate next step without considering the long range vision or implications (which I would say is related to the former point). That's totally understandable given your situation; I would just emphasize clicking a level above what you're mired in right now.
In some ways you remind me of PAtoPharm[toAA] - you ruminate a great deal about external factors and the statistics, and I would recommend you also think about what it is that defines you and drives you.
More concretely: your strength as it stands is not coding and you will be starting from square 1 along with everyone else going to boot camps. If you go into a DS/CS graduate degree, you will be behind others who studied or worked in a related field prior and need to catch up. Where you would be more differentiated is in healthcare and pharma-related adjacencies and you should fully leverage this to dimensionalize your DS/CS value prop.
Interesting points. I think the issue with me understanding my value proposition has a lot to do with the fact that it's hard to see how, as a new graduate who lacks residency training and is competing with thousands of other new graduates for very few jobs, I have
any value proposition or competitive edge whatsoever. I've seen a few other forum users state that there are only so many ways for new pharmacists to differentiate themselves so as to make themselves competitive for jobs, and I think that statement is really relevant here. Also, even if I did have more of a value proposition/competitive edge, it invokes the catch-22 of asking the question of which jobs I'd even be competitive for; if they truly are exclusively chain retail jobs in rural BFE areas, I honestly think I'd rather shoulder the risks (a few of which you pointed out) associated with pursuing something else entirely.
That's at least one of the major upsides of pursuing a career in CS; sure, there's no guarantee of getting a job in the field, but the candidates-to-jobs ratio is still favorable enough from the candidates' perspective such that a new graduate actually has a chance of finding a decent entry-level job somewhere.
Unfortunately there are, but it's all the things a company can't do with incentive severance pay: can't make a covenant to remain unemployed to collect benefits, can't give a non-compete clause anymore (looking at you CA), can't make a covenant to renege on COBRA and other ERISA benefits. That all used to happen. But no, there is no requirement that any business that has unemployment insurance give severance. Only industry to avoid this are railroads. It sucks to be corporate.
As far as Data Science and all that, I'm already seeing the flood of applications for GS-11 and 12 positions with data science credentials. You want a job that pays well, has great job security, and excellent benefits, try garbage collection. It's unionized to the hilt, under extreme regulatory scrutiny due to past history, it's just a dirty job. You don't even have to go to college for it. But for Python, R, etc. without a mathematics/statistics/CS major with advanced data structures (and I mean time travel, dynamic graphs, compressed linearity), you'll get that entry job like a pharmacy tech, but you will go no further. And even the pharmacist equivalents there are getting laid off or facing drastic pay cuts even in FAANG. The SA's and others on their boards are talking jobs.
You want a good IT job that pays well and is extremely stable, do something unsexy because there's no rush into it. Learn M or Intersystems Cache and go into FAANG. Learn COBOL for an easy $100k-$150k and a stable career in the civil service (a whole lot more as a DoD contractor). Know FORTRAN at the supercomputing level with good topology programming knowledge, and you can name your salary before Google (I should know, they just made me an unsolicited offer last week to take over one of their screwed up projects, and I'm considering it because I don't have to move and I'm pretty pissed off with HHS Protect's increasing takeover of the federal health data systems).
But don't think it isn't a grind. I spend about 8 hours a week on the CS equivalent of CE to keep my skills in tune, and I am very specialized. People who have broader scopes spend even more time than that keeping up. Your job isn't just the time you work in that field, it's the time you spend having to keep sharp. This homework is pretty much the same: Same with the cosmetic surgery bills and gym work for sales reps, same for extensive product and client development for the MSA's, same for the the extended hours the supervisors and DM's put in poring over the numbers and making sure the VP isn't on their case. There are plenty of days that I wish I was paid eight hours a day to do a dumb job and then decouple, but on the other hand, the work is its own reward. You need to find work that the labor itself is something you look forward to doing as it's really the only lasting reward you get.
Thanks for taking the time to type up this post; your response provides some really valuable information. What you said about GS-11/12 DS positions getting flooded with applicants is actually kind of ironic, seeing as one of the contacts I was put in touch with (a senior DS at a FAANG company) basically echoed the sentiment and advised me to pursue more broadly marketable education/training in software engineering over DS. Of course, he works in the private sector, but he told me that what's starting to happen is that a flood of doctoral-educated STEM graduates with heavy math backgrounds (e.g., applied stats, applied math, physics, etc.) are rushing to learn DS and apply to positions in the field, largely because university-based positions in their academic disciplines are extremely competitive to obtain (and this was the case pre-pandemic as well). He really emphasized that I'd be better off pursuing SWE/CS instead of DS, so I'll probably stick with that.
Out of the 4 programming languages you suggested I learn (COBOL, Cache, M, FORTRAN), the only one I'd already heard of was COBOL, so I guess that bodes fairly well in terms of future job prospects. I did a bit of research last night on the learning resources that are available for those languages, and the vast majority of resources I came across were either free or inexpensive tutorials. With all the learning resources emphasizing self-teaching, do you know if there are any objective criteria that have to be met by applicants for jobs that involve having expertise in any of those languages? Would I be a competitive candidate even without any formal education in those languages (I.e., exclusively self-taught)?
What other CS professionals have told me is that it's generally a good idea to learn a popular language like Java as a "base" language (e.g., through a bootcamp) first, and then subsequently learn other languages later on. Would you recommend following that strategy in this case? Or is there a substantial enough demand for engineers who are proficient in those 4 languages that it would be worthwhile to jump right in to learning one of them prior to learning a more ubiquitous language like Java?
Thanks again for your post!
Great insights and agree with Jbrl as well.
As it stands, you're a bottom rung candidate in every field you have gone into - whether that's Pharmacy today or maybe CS in the future. There's nothing inherently wrong with that given that you're in the beginning of your career. That's fine when you're 22 and you just finished your BS, or 26 when you finished your PharmD (a bit less fine if we are being honest), but it becomes more and more of a red flag that there have been multiple major career switches/degrees and no meaningful experience working as a FTE.
You need to catch your break (part of that is luck, part of that is hard work, and part of that is grit). With your resume and partly your attitude, you are making it harder and harder for someone to take a risk on you. Whichever direction you decide to take, I hope you take away something from your 4 years of Pharmacy education and don't land in the same position after another expensive boot camp.
If I were an interviewer, one of the first questions I would ask is -- Why did you give up on pharmacy after 4 years in school, $200k in tuition, and not even getting your license yet? Why do you now want to become a programmer/data scientist?
To respond to the first part of your post - not only that, but I talked to a software engineer who is in charge of hiring entry-level engineers, and he actually said that even though he doesn't have an issue with it, there are some hiring managers out there who would pass over hiring me as a candidate, simply because of that fact that (in their minds) having a doctorate even in an unrelated discipline makes me "overqualified" for entry-level software engineering jobs.
To respond to your second paragraph - if I'm trying to self-reflect, I would say that my issues in pharmacy have been a combination of a lack of luck as well as a lack of grit (but not a lack of hard work). I'm not sure if you saw it, but the other week I made a post where I discussed how I had tentatively been offered an inpatient hospital staffing job that had to be retracted when the hospital's HR department overrode the DOP on the hiring request and told them they were only considering candidates with either residency training or at least a year of inpatient staffing experience.
Similarly, the hospital system I worked as an intern for during pharmacy school said that with the job market being as competitive as it is, they simply cannot justify offering even PRN positions to inexperienced/non-residency-trained pharmacists. They refused to hire another former intern who had worked for the hospital system for around 10 yrs prior to starting pharmacy school.
I would say that those two issues above reflect a lack of luck, although at the same time, don't you agree that at some point, if the numbers (more specifically, ratio of graduates to jobs) get skewed so far to one side that it becomes impossible for someone to meet basic entry-level criteria, it warrants pursuing something else?
In terms of having a lack of grit, I think this is reflected by my unwillingness to take a chain retail job in an extremely rural location, which I can understand looks bad when thousands of my fellow c/o 2020 graduates are, simply because they have no other choice. However, for me, it presents something of a catch-22, simply because I could never imagine myself being happy in such a position. And with many hospitals now declaring retail experience to "not count" towards minimum experience requirements, the chances of me being able to work my way into an inpatient staffing position from a rural chain retail pharmacy job are very slim... so really, if I wouldn't be satisfied on any personal level with that outcome, then what's the point?
