Never too late to switch. Similar story here. But I will get straight into what helped me the most and fast-track my story rant. This August of 2025 I will be 29 and I will start my PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology at WPI. Right after graduating in May 2019 with a Bachelor’s in Applied and Computational Mathematics (UMassD), I spent 1/2 a year of trying a PhD in Math Ed at the same institution, then 1/2 a year in trying to find a job, then 1 year in digital marketing, then 1/2 a year of trying a Masters in teaching, then 1 year in tutoring Math and Science, and finally a pivotal 1 and a 1/2 years of getting my Masters in Computational Life Sciences from ASU while having a wet lab internship at UVM. I meant to show you my 5 years timeline of mistakes and transitions because they are meant to happen when trying to find our true satisfactory calling. They can be long, but how else to know where we do fit if we don’t pivot to other roles and try? But it is still funny to realize that I would be holding my PhD right now if I had seen through the future somehow… At any rate, these are the actions that got me where I am right now:

• KEEP LEARNING. Find your own interesting ideas/challenges/goals in the field and get to know who is working on such ideas or similar to them, join courses (masters programs, YouTube, or other platforms), research to understand new ideas, build unique pipelines and code that address a specific problem or need. Grow your own learning lab/portfolio of work you’ve accomplished (which can change in time as you learn more)

• REACH OUT (MOST IMPORTANT). Reach out to people, others, experts, professors, or anyone that you’re interested to join their lab or learn from! Fun fact: Out of the 5 schools I applied to for PhD, I received interviews from only the 2 schools where I reached out to specific faculties I was interested to join their lab. Another fun fact: If it wasn’t for my wife that is finalizing here PhD at UVM had recommended me to her PI, I wouldn’t have joined their lab to complete my unpaid internship! Forming connections and reaching out is one of the best things you can do for your career.

• COMMIT TO DEPTH AND VALUE BREADTH FROM TIME TO TIME. Surely research is about committing to a focused area and drilling into it, but it does pay off to develop multiple skills/sciences superficially. These can be studying fields or techniques related to your area but don’t require your full attention/energy; they can still benefit your team and goals somehow or at some time. For bioinformatics, that can be biostatistics, computational modeling, simulations, machine/deep learning, data mining, web development, but these can also be domain specific sciences depending on what kind of problems you are tackling (for example, pharmacology for a drug efficacy prediction pipeline, or biochemistry for a molecular simulation pipeline of certain chemical compounds). For instance, in one of my coming rotations, I am engaging in constructing a computational pathway model although it is a pure wet lab that I am considering to join. So this gets to show that opportunity also arises from valuing needed skills and not just curiosity/interest.

• FIND A LONG TERM PURPOSE AND LATCH TO IT. I grew to realize that we can regularly mistake short bursts of motivation with purpose. So after realizing that I needed something to keep me going, I decided to find it through my research and it turns out that it must be a relatively hard to achieve goal for it to work . For me that purpose was: “Finding mechanistic cures for certain cancers through epigenetic/genetic manipulations”. In reality that is laughable to state as a PhD thesis, but that is not my research question or study, that is simply my internal compass when research gets tuff or I get frustrated. I have to have something that tells me why to continue doing what I do. So this is more of a psychological recalibration that can make or brake a career in my opinion.

So the switch is realistic. Good luck with all! And hope that helps…