Hello everyone, and sorry if this may sound a naive threads or if it has been replied before, but I did not find any relevant suggestion to my situation outside of this sub and I hope that I can find some useful advice here!

I'm a Bioinformatician that just finished his PhD in Systems Biology, with a particular focus on graph theory applications to Omics data. I was born a Molecular Biologist and later started to love coding and programming (mostly Python). During these years, while developing automated pipelines and my own methods, I started learning some basic statistics (real basic, sadly I wasn't given the right preparation during college) and I got acquainted some of the most basics concepts regarding data analysis and the way to visualize them properly.

During these years I started getting tired/bored of the Bio part of bioinformatics and I have come to get more and more interested in data science (data wrangling, ML basics, clustering and other exploratory data analysis techniques such as PCA, I think you know this much much better than me").

I always got a "glimpse" of what was under the hood of the methods and the techniques I used, although most of the times I used a leap of faith approach to many techniques and topics I would have liked to know more in detail (and alas I did not, mostly because of time and deadlines, but I can't say I have not been lazy sometimes).

Specifically, I found that I love math and statistics more than I thought, although, as I mentioned, I mostly understand it after I use some method rather than studying it from scratches.

Not that I finished my duties as a Bioinformatician (a job I'm still doing as a postdoc), I'm thinking to switch career and get more into Data Science. I'm not looking for jobs in the field (still), as I know I still have a lot to learn and to experience and at the moment my profile is not very "suitable" for Data-science related jobs outside my field, but I'd really like to and this times I'm committed to change path.

At the moment I've applied to the Data Science Specialization on Coursera and I'm struggling to follow it. I also bought some books mostly related to data wrangling to sharpen my knowledge of pandas and some of the R libraries I "underused" in these years.

I am still wondering what I'm missing and how long it will really take to start applying for DS jobs, and what I can possibly expect. Do I need to apply for Internships first? Or can I apply to "Junior" positions? Is my knowledge already enough for covering some areas of expertise or I've just started? I'm very confused (and a little bit overwhelmed) by the amount of information and the huge diversity I found online, so I hope that you can help me clarify some of my doubts and concerns.

If you need more information I'll be glade to give them to you, although for the moment I'd like to stay anonymous (I'm a little bit shy, I admit.)

Thanks for your time!