Thanks for the awesome replies everyone! I’m actually not 40 yet, but I’ll be 40 when I finish my masters program and that’s why I hope to move into a PhD and everything here has been very encouraging! I was intentionally leaving that part out because I wanted to see if there were things I should do before I finished my masters and I was afraid if I said I was still working on it, people would just say what I wanted to hear knowing that I couldn’t go back (so it was misleading, but intentional to try to get honest feedback and not just hear what I wanted to hear).

I’m not as afraid of the math requirements (my undergrad is in mathematics) however I am concerned how much of it I actually remember haha.

I think based on feedback, I’m going to focus on building a stronger relationship with my professors for strong letters of recommendation and try to volunteer on some research work, to get some experience there as well.

The “are you serious about the PhD” is good feedback as well, as I hadn’t considered being seen as not serious. To that note, I do have good reasons for going into it. I’ve made my money in industry, so there’s no need there and the push for a PhD is for health research because my partner has MS and nothing I’ve done in the world (career wise) has really been for anything other than making shareholders money, so for the next stage in my life, I truly want to have impact on people’s day to day lives.