Pivoting to PE from CS/Biology?
I’m a student at a HYPSM majoring in Computational Biology, which is basically the combination of computer science and biology classes, and I’m interested in getting some feedback on pivoting from a career in academia to biotech PE.
After a long stint in thinking I wanted to do academia, I became interested in PE after I realized that the career seemed to fit better with my personal values (btw - feel free to critique me on my reasoning if I’m wrong). My reasons were mostly (1.) I realized I don’t actually enjoy wet lab biology, but I absolutely love the ideas and concepts of biology and get very excited by learning about new developments, (2.) I want to be at the forefront of new technologies in computational biology, (3.) I want to make an impact in my work, and I feel that PE (as long as I work on companies I believe in) helps companies with good ideas be successful, whereas I think academia is too theoretical and not that impactful, (4.) I’ve always had a love for efficiency and management, and I’ve always been a great project manager, (5.) I like surface-level finance quite a bit - I’ve never deeply studied economics, so I can’t say for certain, but I’ve always enjoyed keeping up with the stock market, managing my finances, and investing in stocks. I plan on minoring in Economics. (6.) And of course, the more superficial side, which is that the pay and job market in academia is terrible and finance pays more, and I would like to move back to London while getting to travel in my career.
My current background is most extensively in research, as I’ve spent most of my time working in labs - although many of my labs ended up having companies founded. However, I have had experience with startups and VC, founding a couple startups myself and leading many business-related ventures. While I’ve worked in VC, I don’t want to do VC because I think there’s too much bullshit and subjectiveness that goes on that just frustrates me.
Because of this, my main question is, what should my path be for pivoting into biotech PE? Do I need to go into IB first then PE? How should I prepare for a career in biotech PE? Is my background in computational biology a positive or negative for biotech PE, as I believe it gives me pretty good quantitative and logical reasoning skills as well as the background knowledge of good science to understand biotech companies? I don’t plan on switching my major because I do enjoy computational biology, but just not in the direction I originally intended. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
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