Your age may be a benefit, actually, if you play your cards right. You may not have the knowledge that someone fresh out of graduate school would have, but you have maturity and (hopefully) stability.
I totally agree. There's books smarts, and then there's knowledge. I've only been an engineer for about a year, and all that math and chemistry I learned aren't actually required for my job. All it does is let me have a theoretical understanding of why things work the way they do. But at the end of the day, a project is successful if changes have an impact on reality. Real world experience is always more important than theoretical ramblings.
If you get into some sort of research, chances are there'll be a handful of new things or equations you have to learn, and eventually you'll do them so much it becomes second hand. You've already got a decade of knowledge with real world experience. Even if research doesn't work out, you'll have a better resume afterwards when you move to something else.
Besides, some of the professors with tenure at my college were so old they could barely find the white/chalk board. And they were still working on 6 figure research grants. Also, my old housemate got her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, but got her masters doing research related to biology.
The law itself is just a mathematical equation. N(t) = N(0)*2^(t/24), where N is the number of transistors at month "t" in the future.
The laws of gravity, momentum, thermodynamics, and such are called laws not because they hold some sort of scared truth about the universe. They are merely laws because they can be expressed as a math equation. For example, the "Ideal Gas Law" in chemistry is PV=nRT. But this law only holds true for an "Ideal Gas," which doesn't truly exist. There's a lot of gasses that behave within this equation under moderate conditions, but at extreme conditions like near absolute zero or in plasma the "law" doesn't work.
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If you get into some sort of research, chances are there'll be a handful of new things or equations you have to learn, and eventually you'll do them so much it becomes second hand. You've already got a decade of knowledge with real world experience. Even if research doesn't work out, you'll have a better resume afterwards when you move to something else.
Besides, some of the professors with tenure at my college were so old they could barely find the white/chalk board. And they were still working on 6 figure research grants. Also, my old housemate got her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, but got her masters doing research related to biology.
Trust me, you'll be fine.
The law itself is just a mathematical equation. N(t) = N(0)*2^(t/24), where N is the number of transistors at month "t" in the future. The laws of gravity, momentum, thermodynamics, and such are called laws not because they hold some sort of scared truth about the universe. They are merely laws because they can be expressed as a math equation. For example, the "Ideal Gas Law" in chemistry is PV=nRT. But this law only holds true for an "Ideal Gas," which doesn't truly exist. There's a lot of gasses that behave within this equation under moderate conditions, but at extreme conditions like near absolute zero or in plasma the "law" doesn't work.