I'll second what timr says, I think a PHD in Bioinformatics is possibly a waste of your time. I got into the field in 2000 immediately after undergrad. Since th

I'll second what timr says, I think a PHD in Bioinformatics is possibly a waste of your time. I got into the field in 2000 immediately after undergrad. Since then, I've been working in industry and did my masters in bioinformatics at a top notch school. I've always had a pretty good feel for where new technology is going, how things are going to advance, etc... but I called bioinformatics completely wrong. I really thought it was going to be much more important than it has actually been. Over the last year or so I started looking for a new job in the field and they are REALLY hard to come by (especially industry jobs in the US). In the end, I managed to get a good position (much more medical informatics that bioinformatics actually). I am very aware that I got super lucky. In fact, I was VERY close to pulling the plug on the whole field and trying my hand at a startup (mostly because I hang out here too much :)). A few years ago, you could count on finding a job at one of the major Pharmas or in a software shop that serves one of them. But many of the pharmas are cash strapped and have been cutting "luxuries" like bioinformatics and software. My experience is that many biotechs are so small and narrowly focused, they often don't benefit from too much bioinformatics work. That leaves academia, but even there, the supply of PHD scientists is way higher than the number of jobs (this is actually a more general problem than in just bioinformatics). I've often regretted that I didn't just go for a straight CS masters so that I could beef up some of those CS concepts you always avoid when your programming for fun. I think you need to decide what your ultimate career goal is. If you want to be a PHD scientist getting grants and doing work at a university, then you have to go the PHD route. But if you think you want to work in industry, I would strongly urge a different route, one that doesn't paint you into a corner too much.