Simple answer? Programming and statistics. These are desperately needed in the sciences, and having them makes me very valuable. I work as a bioinformatician i

Simple answer? Programming and statistics. These are desperately needed in the sciences, and having them makes me very valuable. I work as a bioinformatician in plant genomics. My background is in economics and political science, with a minor in statistics. Jumping into genomics without a background in biology seems impossible, but I learn fast, and programming and statistics are desperately needed. Biologists are typically terrible at statistics, and even worse at programming, so people with skills in these ares are desperately needed. Approaching problems with a social science background is also useful. I was interested in quantitative comparative politics, where observational data is the only data, and one tackles it with advanced models that try to control for confounding variables. Modern-day biology is similar: there may be some randomized experimental design, but confounding is still everywhere. Surprisingly biologists, trained only in randomized designs, don't see it this way.