Hi @Jason Weiland and community. I'm here because I resonated with the pieces you have been writing on Medium. I changed careers in my late 40s to have opportunities to work on projects I cared about in life sciences. I followed an opportunity 8 years ago that led me into bioinformatics and computational biology - not my first choice, but I grew my skill base and found the work enjoyable and meaningful. Until the funding ran out and I found myself job hunting earlier this year. Bioinformatics jobs are increasingly full stack engineering rather than the R&D-slanted computational roles I prefer. While I have leaned into those engineering tasks the past 3 years, and have spent the past 6 months leveling up my coding and machine learning experience, I rarely get past the hiring manager conversation, but mostly I don't even get that far. I am now trying to match the skills I want to apply to the types of projects I would like to work on with the opportunities in the market - it seems like consulting/freelancing is the way to go. I have identified some types of projects where my skills could be applied, but the way forward seems murky most days.