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Switching from Another Industry to Engineering/CS?
WomensHealth asks: "I am a physician, but contemplating a career change perhaps 5 to 10 years down the road. In addition to medicine, what I've always loved is computers and technology, and I think I have a pretty good appreciation for both. What tips could computer industry insiders offer to one who is willing to pursue an independent educational path towards a career in a Computer Science field? MIT's OpenCourseWare seems well put-together, though one can't get a degree using it. How can an old newcomer break into the industry?"
One popular way for MDs to break into the industry is to go to related fields where medical knowledge is being used in the context of IT, such as Medical Informatics. For example, at the Yale Center for Medical Informatics the majority of faculty and scientists hold MDs or are MD/Ph.Ds. You don't need to obtain a degree per se; as long as you can show that you know what-you-are-doing(tm). Do a post-doc at an informatics department. Talking to the IT people at your hospital can help. Start playing more with computer hardware and programming languages. Implement and deploy IT solutions that assist in your medical care. Your colleagues having trouble with their nifty new handhelds? Take a look at them over the weekend. Not happy with your new-fangled patient tracking system? Talk to the developer and analyze the database.
There are tons and tons of existing resources available both in print and online that you can use to learn the stuff you need. An MD is already a terminal degree; unless you are looking for academic/faculty computer science positions, it is not entirely necessary to have to go to school for IT at this time.
As far as the market is concerned, there is always interest in people who possess both a human-oriented and computer-oriented skillset; especially for places that are full of one-kind-but-not-the-other. (Like in a setting where everyone is a physician but they don't know IT, or a group of IT people who want someone who understands the biomed field).
The market is currently quite rough, especially to break into. After being laid off when a product tanked on the market, I've gone a few months without having a single resume responded to - and I have almost a decade of professional programming experience that was applicable to the jobs I've applied for (and my resume used to keep the phones ringing daily for months when I posted it - the market has changed a bit).
I've been spending the extra time continuing development on my personal code library and projects, writing open source code, and working on a few products that I expect there to be a market for when they're done. That's how I'd suggest breaking into the field as well.
You have a very special situation though - you know, or can find out if you think about it and ask your colleagues, exactly what one fairly wealthy niche market needs. What software would help you - as a doctor - work more efficiently? What software have you and your colleagues found lacking? There's your first project :)
It won't be easy, and you won't make money fast. My recommendation would be to start learning about computers and computer programming now while thinking about products. As soon as you feel like you can design a useful program and have one in mind - take a shot at it.
Use CVS ( or for Windows, WinCVS ) or some other revision control so you can keep track of all the code you write (I wish I had when I started!). Estimate for yourself how long tasks should take - track those estimates, and figure out why they were right or wrong. Document everything, especially the code.
Once you have a product you think is worthy for your target audience - use it yourself in your work. Then let some colleagues try it out. Fix anything you find wrong with it, and ask your colleagues for suggestions.
Then, set up a website, advertise it, and try to sell it - or set up a project on SourceForge and make it open source - whichever you feel more comfortable with. On SourceForge, you'll be able to enlist the help of other more experienced programmers and together tailor the product towards excellence. If you sell it and it's successful, you'll be able to afford to switch careers to full-time programmer/entreprenuer and just work on your business.
That brings me to another point - if you aren't currently running your own doctor's office, start learning business skills too. They're just as hard to pick up as programming skills - possibly harder for some. Figure out what you'll need to do to start running your own software company. Even if you decide to write your own software as open source and become an employee for someone else professionally, this will help you at the negotiating table.
What I would NOT recommend is dropping out of medicine, getting a BS in computer science, and expect doors to be immediately open when you g
I write code.
Work for the federal government. The pay may not be as sexy as private industry was during the dot com boom, but I've had a steady job for 6 years now since I got out of college, good raises every year, flexible hours, relaxed work environment, etc. I can guarentee you the government isn't going to outsource it's IT to India. ;-)
Are you affiliated with any local or regional hospitals?
Knock on wood, but we're not outsourcing. Too many bad experiences.
Do you want to continue on in the medical industry? There are PLENTY of opportinities there. If you are affiliated with a local hospital, see about getting on one of the technology commities. They're usually the IT staff who work with Doctors/Nurses/etc to get technology into their hands. Then gradually make your move into IS. No degree necessary.
I cant speak for where you live, but there are tons of opportunities for the medical community folks to work in IT here.
Actually, the field that a physician with computer expertise would be extremely well-qualified for is medical informatics.
This is very, very different than bioinformatics or computational biology, both of which might use "supercomputers to solve biology problems".
Actually, there is talk that medical informatics and bioinformatics might be coming together. There is a relatively young field called pharmacogenomics, which is the study of how each individual's distinct genetic makeup affects how the drugs we take work.
Here is a PubMed link to an article about the potential for collaboration between bioinformatics and medical informatics. The abstract is free on PubMed, but unless you have access to a subscription to the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the article will cost you $5.
With a little luck, and a few courses, I suspect that an MD might be able to get into this field without getting a CS degree. However, I am not all that familiar with hiring practices in the field (I'm more on the bioinformatics side), so it would be best to find someone in medical informatics to ask.
A particularly hot area right now (no guarantee it'll stay this way) is the management of clinical trial data. I get a lot of recruiters contacting me looking for people with this sort of expertise.