mmmmm cultured meats drools

Oh man! A labrat like myself. I did my undergrad in biochem and had great interest in industrial microbiology (I still have the interest but I did then too). Unfortunately, I graduated in the middle of the Recession, just after mass off-shoring of chem jobs. From my experiences, I can offer this:

First, getting through the degree, regardless of other outcomes is worth it. It will keep you from regretting not finishing it and look much better, career-wise. If you want to continue in research, it’s likely worth it to plan for and get applications in for graduate programs, specifically looking for those with good TA and RA work associated with them. I didn’t go that route and, due to the circumstances, was not able to pursue a career in the field at that time.

Now, if you decide that you’re not interested in spending more years in academia and getting into the publish-or-die cycle, you’re still getting some very useful and marketable skills.

First and foremost is practice and familiarity with abstract thought. This is an incredibly useful skill in any field. You’re learning about things that you cannot readily see and touch. This by itself requires developing skills for understanding things that may not be tangible.

Next, research and self-guided learning. I’m assuming that you are required to do some form of independent study and produce a paper on it. This is a skillset that both enables you to better learn other things and is incredibly useful in technical, medical, and legal fields.

How about instrumentation? In your studies, you’ll need to learn, at minimum, bright-field microscopy, IR spectroscopy, NMR, UV/Vis spectrophotometry, and likely several forms of chromatography as well as the basics of mass spectrometry. While these are all specialized instruments, the skills needed to learn how to use them translate into learning how to use other technical equipment. There are a number of medical technologist professions that use the exact skills that you’re learning.

The microbiology component is also quite useful. You should be learning how to do both liquid cultures and plate them with sterile technique. This is a bit more narrow in scope than other skills but, it is very valid in agricultural and fermented food industries. Brewery, for example, relies on maintaining established strains of yeast to keep a consistent product. It also requires chemical analysis to quantify characteristics of the wort, the hops varieties, and the final product (mandatory in for most regulations).

Overall, the technical skills call also translate well to the tech industry (where I ended up). This can be somewhat direct in a field like data science, or, it can set you up for software engineering, where understanding data, how to analyze and transform it, and do other useful things with it is rather fundamental.

Finally, let’s talk about that depression. By needing to work through that, you’ll be keeping pharmacists, therapists, and other mental health professionals employed. (Last paragraph here is joking but do see someone for depression, if you suffer from it).