It's great, I'm really happy to be learning so much new and different material and equally happy I didn't go to Silicon Valley. I think I had previously carved

It's great, I'm really happy to be learning so much new and different material and equally happy I didn't go to Silicon Valley. I think I had previously carved a little niche for myself where I felt like an expert and didn't even realize the scope of broader (more important) problems about which I knew very little. Pro: * Learning about genomics, immunology & cancer * Working on clinical trials (i.e. might help a real person) * Seeing how science works as an institution (interesting peek inside the sausage factory) Con: * Doctors (& some biologists) tend to be more hierarchical than I'm used to from CS. You sometimes need to flash credentials to be treated respectfully (I have a PhD in CS, so that helps). * Hospitals and their bureaucracies are insane. So, if you want to actually have patient impact you'll have to deal with some really byzantine processes (and the madmen who create them). * Bioinformatics tools are crappy and their authors have few incentives to learn software carpentry. Related: file formats are designed to solve a specific problem and then get sloppily extended by everyone else. * Biology accumulates a lot of historical baggage in its naming conventions (i.e. weird names are often explained by "SoAndSo thought it interacted with SomeOtherProtein in 1953"). This makes learning a lot harder than it could be.