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Comment by TinyRick | Hacker News Reader

I would love to do something like this but simply cannot afford it. I think it is good advice but going back to school for a degree one does not plan on utilizing is not as feasible today as it was in the 80's, largely due to the sizeable increase in tuition without reciprocal increases in wages.

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In this day and age, you can do this for FREE and on the side, whenever you have time!

There are tons of very well-done professional level video courses on Youtube.

There are more organized courses that only ask you for money for the "extras", like some tests and a certificate, but the main parts, texts and videos, are free.

You could start with a really good teaching professor (Eric Lander, MIT) and his course: https://www.edx.org/learn/biology/massachusetts-institute-of... (the "Audit" track is free, ignore the prices; also ignore the "expires" - this course restarts every few months and has been available in new versions for many years now)

It's very engaging!

There's similar courses for everything in the life sciences, there on edX, on Youtube, many other places.

I feel the true Internet is soooo underutilized by most people! Forget news sites, opinion blogs, or social media. Knowledge is there for the taking, free. Only the organized stuff, where you end up with a certificate costs money, but they usually still provide the actual content for free.

Time and energy are also at a premium in the current economy. Good luck learning biochemistry by watching YouTube videos after 8+h of coding and meetings plus commute plus making dinner plus cleaning up.

Depending on where you live, and what you want to study, you might be able to take a couple courses at the community college in areas of interest without spending a lot of money.

I was paid to get a PhD in Biology, albeit just enough to live on. Most people in PhD programs are, either through being a TA (teacher's assistant) or RA (research assistant). The real financial cost is the opportunity cost of 5-6 years of your life.

Whether or not broad support for training scientists holds up during and after the current administration remains to be seen.

Please, the cost isn’t your life, that is life and it is great.

My current tuition is under 500 CAD per class. The opportunity cost of not working full time is the real bulk of the cost of studying in places that have a functional government.

I'm pretty sure it's still the case that you get paid to be a graduate student in science.

>I would love to do something like this but simply cannot afford it.

Work for a company that will pay for it.

I can't imagine why a company would pay an engineer to get a masters degree in biology

A lot of companies will pay for at least part of whatever college classes you take, without auditing whether or not it would be good for your specific job.

I encourage people to look into it, it's a benefit a lot of people have but don't use and it's leaving money on the table.

Every company I ever worked for constrained it in many ways

1. Masters degree only, they won't pay for anyone to get a bachelor's or associates

2. Must maintain a B average or better

3. Cannot take any time off, it has to be entirely on nights and weekends

4. Reimbursement after the fact, so you're taking on the initial financial risk up front.

Plus usually the employer wants it to be related to ones job, from their very limited perspective of the world and management decisions. For example I couldn't even take a language course for education vacation, as the employer did not make any use of my language skills.

I had a job with an education budget listed as benefits.

However, to use it there are constraints: 1. The topic should be related to technologies used by company. Cannot get a Google cloud certification as they are using aws. 2. To get it you need approval by line manager, hr, and director of the office. 3. If it is more than €250 you need to sign up loyalty agreement for a year. Meaning if you will return some amount of you quit.

With all that strings attached it is just a marketing bullshit to attract new hires.

Can you say more? What kind of company would so such a thing? Maybe I live in a bubble but that's so far outside of what I've seen that it just sounds fantastical.

Ok, both of these comments made me doubt my memory so I just checked and my current employer, a very large consumer company, and the limits of the program are that you get a C or above, and the class is "related" to your job or any job you can get at the company. But I've gotten classes paid for that only tangentially related to my job with no problem. So I concede that you might not get a biology degree as an engineer but my particular company does a lot of different things so my guess is in practice you'd have no problems. I also worked at a now-defunct mid-size startup and a hospital system with similarly loose requirements but I don't have access to their docs anymore.

My company uses guildeducation.com and we can use basically $5k a year (I think, it might be semester), a lot of if it is just individual classes, but there are also some degree programs. I don't know if they preselect which courses are available to us or if we have access to the whole catalog. I suspect it's somewhat curated, because we are a medical company and most of it is medical stuff. There is a CS bachelor's program but last I checked there wasn't an MS CS program.

I would assume most companies with 100+ office workers (essentially big enough for an HR department) usually offer something like this in western countries.

Try something in the medical field, my company will pay for a bunch of medical related stuff when I just want to further my CS background.

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