I’ve been contemplating switching careers from lawyering to forensic computing. The major hindrance here is that I have no computer science background.
Has anyone obtained a degree and some work experience in one career only to leave it behind completely and do something different? How did the transition work? Did you need another degree in order to switch or did you just simply find another job?
I thought I’d change careers at 63 from being a union organizer to being a lawyer…but I don’t have a law degree so I’ll think twice on that. 
Yes, I got a masters degree and worked as a teacher for several years, then fled to a variety of jobs, eventually working in a couple of different areas of accounting. I had an undergraduate minor in math but no training in accounting and got my skills on the job. However, I’m not sure one can do that these days. I also don’t think I could have gone straight from teaching to accounting without getting another degree or at least taking some courses. I was lucky in my bosses; they wanted me to do stuff (add certain jobs to my regular tasks) and let me figure out how.
I hope you can figure out a way to do this, Lakai; forensic computing sounds fascinating. I have done some very basic forensic accounting and it was fun. I wonder if taking a few courses would get your foot in the door? Or finding a mentor? That was sort of what I did.
Sort of. I was a broadcast journalist, and I went overseas and spent two years teaching English when I was 35. I loved it,best job I ever had, but I could not continue in it realistically because I had no credentials. That was in that transition period (1970s) when employability shifted from what you can do, to what academic documents you have labored for years to buy from the education/industrial complex.
Depends on your definition of ‘late in life’.
I spent years in journalism and as a business starter. At 45 my doctor told me I couldn’t take another start up process - 45 ain’t 35 ain’t 25 - and I took a leap at financial management. This included getting several licenses as well as certifications and such.
I’m 49 now and it seems to be going well. It’s not as exciting as starting my own firms but it’s less stressful, I can tell you that for sure.
I was an aircraft mechanic for 24 years in the US Air Force. Towards the second half of my career I got into training mechanics. I liked teaching so I got a BS degree in education. I figured that I’d teach high school.
However during the last four years I got into a headquarters job that required a lot of computer skills. I found out that I was a natural at database design. So I got a master’s degree in Computer Resource Management. When I retired from the USAF, I got an IT job and now work as an Oracle Database Administrator.
I didn’t waste my education degree though. I taught computer night classes as an adjunct faculty at a local college for 16 years. I was one of the few instructors who knew both the subject matter and a thing or two about teaching.
I suggest that the OP take a few night classes that could lead to the computer skills he wants. That way he could see if he has an aptitude for it.
I would think that the combination of being a lawyer and forensic computing could lead to a very interesting and needed skill set.
Probably not as late as others but I completely switched gears in my late twenties and other than having live with a huge cut in pay for a few years, I had no regrets really.
There are two sides to forensic computing.
The technicians are the people who actually find the data, and they’ll have a computer science background, but more than that an in depth knowledge of hardware, systems software, and some specific applications software. So not so much what they learned in school, but real world experience, and constantly relearning to keep up with changes in technology.
The other side of this are the analysts. These are the people who gather and assess the information collected by technicians. Not much computer science is needed at all. This is a job for detail oriented people with good organizational and communication skills. These are the people who generate the reports used as evidence and generally the ones who will testify at trials and depositions. I think it would be a very good fit for a lawyer who could have been a good accountant as well.
I went from career military to civilian life. Does that count?
I worked in real estate for 26 years. I’m now a retail cashier.
Although you appear to be asking for other people’s experience in transitioning careers rather than soliciting advice about your own decission, it may be useful to provide a little background on your own situation so responders can provide pertinent experience. What piqued your interest in forensic computing? Are you genuinely interested in the field for its own sake or are you just kind of desperate to get away from what you are currently doing? Have you worked in the field in some capacity previously, do you know others who have recommended it to you based upon your skills, or is it something you’ve read about and have interest in. You say you have “no computer science background”; do you mean that you have no education in computer science but enjoy coding and scripting, you don’t program but you enjoy logical puzzles or have a fair amount of statistics and mathematics, or that you literally have no experience in the coding, algoritm development, data analysis, et cetera? How much research have you done in the field of forensic computing? As TriPolar notes, there is a general breakdown of “shooters” and “planners”, i.e. the people who make and apply the tools to process data and develop basic statistics, and the people who interpret the statistics and look for patterns or develop plans for protection, and within that there are many industry-specific niches for people with particular expertise, just as practicing “corporate litigation” or “international law” has many different areas of actual practice.
To address your question, I’ve investigated and then declined career transitions twice, and am currently considering another. The first time I was contemplating going back to school to get a doctorate in computational molecular biology with an intented focus in genomics, and specifically investigating defects that occur during DNA replication. This was based in part on a growing interest in evolutionary and developmental biology in general, and specifiically in applying computational methods that I’ve learned in school or on the side but have had little opportunity to apply in engineering practice. I ultimately decided not to pursue this path because while I found the discipline area interesting I wasn’t assured that I’d be able to work on what I really wanted to do, the opportunity cost of spending 6-7 years of my thirties back in grad school was not fiscally appealing, I was not at all confident that I’d have the fortitude to see the research I was assigned through to a PhD, and finally the graduate students of the PI I was contemplating working for (and whom he had sent me to talk to) were ambivilent about his management and advising. It was probably the correct decision, but whenever I read about new advances in the field and see techniques I myself would have applied I do feel a twinge of regret. On the other hand, on the few occasions where I’ve actually talked to people working in the field, they seem almost universally miserable and overstressed over the state of non-applied (i.e. non-phrama) research and their eventual career path, even those who have survived the “publish or perish” phase of a post-doc and have some degree of sustained funding.
My other planned career shift was to become a screenwriter. This was based on a long fascination with both films and the sometimes-creative-but-often-tortured process of creating a story, characters, and then guiding the plot complications to a logical conclusion, often to the point of obsessiveness. (I have a good memory for dialog and imagery, and there are many films I can describe scene by scene and quote the entire dialogue end-to-end.) I took a film survey class as a well-regarded film school (primarily intended for people in the industry to get a more comprehensive understanding of the filmmaking process and also to network). The class itself was fantastic; I learned to break down scenes and construct them in a written screenplay in order to make them filmable; how to define character motivations in dialogue alone; the mechanics of a shoot, and how to estimate the amount of time it takes to set up and shoot different kinds of scenes (and how to do it most efficiently); and of course, how to actually format and write stories in a cinematic context, which is very, very different from writing a novela or novel. (Most films have about the same story content as a long short story, but of course, much of the effort in making a filmable story is providing the appropriate visual context, hence why adapting a full novel to a single 120-180 minute film inevitable loses major chuncks of material and often whole characters, and why the miniseries or short series format is far more amenable to direct adaptation as seen with the BBC Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or the HBO miniseries of Mildred Pierce are far more faitful and complete renditions of their source material than the movies of the same.) Anyway, as you can tell, I love writing and films, and I think I’m pretty conversant with both. What I’m not tolerant of is all of the horseshit that goes along with the film industry, most of which has as little to do with the creative process of making films as the pharamceutical industry does with making people healthier.
In my networking with people who were working grunt level positions in the industry (production assistances, script readers, et cetera) who aspired to creative or production positions I came to view the industry as a largely soul-sucking abyss where creative work sometimes happens despite, rather than because of, all of the help. Unless you happen to be both lucky and smart, and not just a little handsome–as in, write your own screenplay, get it noticed by some already popular figure who pushes it up exective levels of a production studio to get it made, get a key supporting role by the same, cast a bunch of your friends in it who are so comfortable with each other it doesn’t even seem like acting, and then win an Oscar which serves as a launchpad for a career in an almost unbroken string of acclaimed performances–the odds are good that you are going to end up working the sitcom grind, or shitting out production notes for some craptastic reality TV show, or writing terrible poetry in a seedy East Hollywood dive bar. Three of my favorite working writer/directors are Shane Black (originally noted for selling screenplays for Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Last Action Hero for record-breaking amounts, then writer/director of the awesome but little seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the often panned but ambitious Iron Man 3), Charlie Kaufman (wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, writer/director of Synecdoche, N.Y. and writer/co-director of last year’s stop-motion Anomalisa), and Martin McDonagh (playwright tuned filmmaker of In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths). However, despite their obvious talents and critical acclaim, only Black has achieved any real measure of career success, and mostly by selling scripts and script-doctoring rather than through his own production, and his battles with production studios are almost as legendary as Orson Welles. I have a hard time seeing myself as dedicating the decades to that kind of career with a relatively poor chance of being financially or creatively successful.
I’m currently considering another transition option, going from engineering (in the space launch industry) to space property and regulatory law. This would mean the opportunity cost of sitting out three years of what is probably my most productive earning years going to school as well as accumulating debt; on the other hand, I’ve gotten about as far as I’m ever going to go in a technical engineering position, and having sampled management and found both and myself wanting I have no interest in trying to pursue an executive level track at a conventional aerospace firm, nor am I overly enthused about working for a space start-up unless I feel I have significant input and control over technical decisions affecting the success of the company. So, I’m still looking at both the opportunities that pursuing the requisite education would open up, both in “space law” (such as it is) and associated areas of legal practice such as tech-based intellectual property law, and the costs associated with that transition, which are unappealing to say the least, but may ultimately prove to be worth it.
At some point, however, you have to stop studying and being critical, and make a decision to fish or cut bait. Either a transition is worth it–if not finanically, then in career satisfaction or a sense of moral duty in doing something that is right rather than just what is easiest–or it isn’t, and you stake your claim or go home.
I don’t know if any of that stream of consciousness actually helped, but sharing some of your particulars may get you more focused and appropriate insight. Good luck to you in whatever decision you make.
Stranger
My research thus far into forensic computing has been reading about various graduate level forensic computing programs online and starting this thread. I have no experience with coding, data analysis and this is the first time I heard of algorithm development.
I went into the legal profession with the intention of getting involved with law enforcement (e.g. prosecutor or domestic abuse advocate) and things went sideways and I became a real estate attorney. Learning about the law has always been the most difficult subject for me because the law deals with people making decisions. I’m not my best with people. I like cold hard data or math where the results do not fluctuate based on how much the numbers like me or how well I’m dressed or how confident I sound.
I remember that forensic computing was a really appealing career choice back when I was in college and I decided to become a lawyer instead. I’ve been fond of it ever since, but now I am really considering jumping ship because I do not want to spend the rest of my life being an attorney.
Now I’m just doing some background work to find out what is required to break into forensic computing. I’m confident I could learn how to code, but I need to know how much extra schooling and money is required to break into the field. If there is a way to do it without going broke or becoming homeless then I will seriously consider it.
I’ve actually wrote a few terrible short stories for my own amusement. I have often thought about writing a few terrible screenplays as well simply because I love watching films. How many screenplays have you written after taking the class?
For what it’s worth, I have heard similar opinions from actors and filmmakers about the industry. I would consider it as a decent career option if not for the fact that so many people cannot make any money from it.
I think it’s absolutely beautiful that you want to be a space lawyer. Can I ask you why you are interested in becoming a lawyer? It sounds like you and I are trying to go in opposite directions. You’re going from a technical field into a legal field, and I’m running away from the legal field into a technical field.
The financial part is what worries me most. If I end up being miserable in a new career, then I am ok with that because I see it as a net gain or loss of zero.
I taught high school English for 5 years, then quit until my two daughters were school age. I tried to get back into teaching but there were no jobs. The best I could find was a temporary fill-in for two months at a school about an hour’s drive away.
I took a job doing data entry, which eventually led me to programming and systems analysis. I obtained an Associate’s degree. After a few decades in that field I was laid off in my fifties and was unable to get another job, mostly because of age. I got wonderful feedback on my resume at several places but after an in-person interview I was never chosen.
I eventually took a job doing customer service and related tasks at an international freight forwarder. I procured and arranged bookings and related intermodal transport. Then I retired.
So, yes, it’s possible.
Not me, but my sister went from being a professional jazz muscian in her 20’s to a computer science geek doing work for the department of defense in her 30’s to part-time accountant for her husband’s business in her 40’s, entered medical school at 46, earned her MD, and is now working at a doctor in her 50’s.
Yeah, the family overachiever.
So… that’s a Bachelor’s in Music, followed by a computer degree (think that one was a master’s but not sure), followed by an associate’s in accounting/bookkeeping, then the MD.
Clearly it’s possible but she’ll be the first to tell you it was a crap-ton of work.
(AND she raised two kids, including one with a serious chronic medical problem, in amongst all that - like I said, overachiever. And her husband helped out a lot with the kids, including being stay-at-home-dad for about 3 years at one point. Family support can be really important for mid-life career changes.)
I think it’d be worth three years of law-school just to be able to introduce yourself as a “Space Lawyer”
Careers; no. Once I sold off my own business I decided that whatever I did it would basically just be a job. I didn’t/don’t need to work, I didn’t need to advance, and I didn’t plan on being anywhere more than a few years or until it failed to interest me. But I will say that in this I’m an exception.
I don’t mean to suggest that all positions in forensic computing will require extensive expertise in coding or algorithm development; in fact, I suspect many do not. However, as with any field it is good to have a good foundation of basic skills an an understanding of what people working in computing in general do so that you can interpret their particular jargon and understand why and how they make decisions. Looking at graduate program prequisites and information about careers those can lead to is useful, but I’d recommend not stopping there, and looking into other areas you should know, like data science, operating system development and exploitation, et cetera, i.e. the technical nuts-and-bolts of actually doing forensic work, even if you are planning to be on a more managerial or policy side. Most computer science/computer engineering people do not spend the bulk of their time programming or even debugging, especially once they are past a junior level, but they definitely benefit from understanding how programming is done and when to apply certain frameworks or prinicples in developing different types of software systems or applications.
I have never written a complete screenplay for a feature-length movie or hour long single camera show. I have written a couple of sitcom episodes (as an assignment) and several short format films (5-10 minutes), which is about the same as a vignette. Writing a good screenplay is incredibly difficult, which I don’t think people realize when they blame the screenwriter for a bad film; it is very difficult to write a screenplay that is a good balance of stage direction (which is generally minimized) and yet focuses on the appropriate dialogue or visual description, especially if you don’t know the characteristics of who will be playing the main part. And it is pretty much guaranteed that whatever you write is going to be revised, edited, and often blatantly plagerized by the director, producer, actors who feel a need to put their own imprint on your carefully crafted dialogue, and probably the best boy and catering crew as well. Unless you are a writer/director, you have no control over your script once you hand it over (see the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliant turn as a playwrite turned screenwriter in Mamet’s State & Main, being told to adjust the story of his screenplay “The Old Mill” to not actually feature a mill because it was burned down decades before…this was directly born of Mamet’s experience scriptdoctoring other scripts for hire.)
This isn’t to say that you can’t make a good living as a screenwriter. Thousands of people do (although in the era of reality t.v. and creative control in the hands of producers with a singular vision it is more difficult), but the odds are you are going to end up either grinding out scripts for sitcoms and angsty dramas that are just trick bags of genre tropes and some almost random dialogue to glue it all together (e.g. The Big Bang Theory) or you’re going to be ghostscripting or scriptdoctoring other peoples’ work. This can be quite lucrative if you have some hustle and make appropriate connections, but after a few years its just as much of a fucking grind as any job. If you want to do really creative work that defies viewer’s expectations or is actually sharp and witty rather than what passes for funny (do we really need yet another Rush Hour orRide Along movie?) then you have to be prepared to spend decades–maybe even a lifetime–grinding out saleable shit while pitching your original ideas to every decision maker and flapper you can contact in the hope that they’ll fund your pet script about actual futurist-based science fiction rather than make yet another Star Wars or Star Trek film that will guarantee a return regardless of how much dreck it is.
I’m not so much interested in being a lawyer per se–which is a potential red flag to the entire notion–as I am being able to do useful work in an area that is currently retarding the progress of the nascent space launch and spacecraft industry to develop necessary technologies and formulate appropriate regulatory oversight and safety protocols without proving a hindrince to innovation. For instance, under current laws, spacecraft cannot visualize other spacecraft unless they are granted specific approval by USAF Space Command, which is only granted for systems that are being developed for the Air Force or DARPA. This is in place for good reason–to prevent the deployment of a capability that could be used to attack other satellites or surveil classified military satellites and missions up close–but this forstalls any commercial effort to develop spacecraft salvage or repair capabilty. If we don’t develop it, other nations will, so it makes no sense to continue to apply a blanket prohibition that was drafted in the 'Seventies to current industry any more than it does to limit “horseless carriages” to only the speed of a trotting horse, but that is the current state and almost no one is working on modifying it to support commercial application. Similarly, the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) is responsible for licensing commercial flights and approving new vehicle configurations for operation, but has almost no technical capability and absolutely no framework for evaluating weekly flights of reusable vehicles with reentry modes. This became evident in last year’s SpaceShipTwo failure which posed a real public hazard about which AST just blithly accepted The Spaceship Company’s specious evaluation that it posed a negligable hazard.
So I feel as if there is a need for competent technical knowledge in formulating and applying laws and regulation to forestall (or at least limit) the kinds of catastrophies that plagued early commercial air travel, while encouraging commercial development. I feel as if I have a very appropriate engineering background for this plus an ability to formulate ideas and positions about highly technical issues in language suitable for non-technical audiences. It certainly seems more useful and interesting than what I’m doing now, and has a greater potential for salary than the startup company path, plus being a “space lawyer” is just one rung lower than being a “space pirate” or “hero astronaut” on the Ladder of Titular Coolness, so I suspect it would make a good pickup line (and also offer great fodder for Arrested Development references). However, I’m not innately interested in law in general, and especially not the often wasteful conflict of direct litigation, nor am I that interested in the more arcane areas that have no application to space industries or space exploration. But mostly I fear spending the money and time on a law education, presumably passing both state and Patent Office bar exams, and then discovering that there isn’t sufficient work or that I’m not well suited or desired to do the work, and then ending up having to work for some kind of patent troll or other area of legal practice that is repugnant and uninteresting, even if the money is better than what I can possibly achieve in my current field.
So I don’t know how much that helps you with your decision, but that is my conundrum.
Stranger
Right? “Stranger Train, Space Lawyer.”
Do you think they’ll get Matt Damon to play me in the movie? Because that would sell it for me. I feel like he can handle both the psychological and physical parts of my persona, especially the time I had to fight my way out of a hotel in La Paz against a Russian Spetsnaz team with nothing more than a bathrobe, a martini shaker, and a can of Silly String.
Stranger
Lawyers usually do not formulate regulations. Those are created by politicians and special interests with an eye toward maximizing profits and minimizing political fallout. The regulations end up being terrible and nearly unworkable.
Lawyers are the grease in the system of terrible regulations that make the entire system move. Without lawyers to explain what the laws are and how to work around the stupid laws, no one would be able to do a damn thing. Lawyers do not shape policy, they are there to do most of the grunt work.
It sounds like you want to be a lawyer for the Federal Aviation Administration. I cannot think many other positions that would let you influence regulations on commercial space travel. Have you looked into what it would take to work for the FAA? To be employed in a federal agency as an attorney you really need excellent grades and connections. It’s very difficult to get a job in any federal agency as an attorney, much less in a specific agency.
I do not want to say your goal is impossible, but it is definitely difficult. Finishing three years of law school would just be a starting point. It is more likely you will end up advising someone how to work around the stupid laws that you became a lawyer trying to change.
I hope this helps with your conundrum.
PT Barnum did not enter the circus business until he was 60 years old.