[dickson66]

Your comment feels like something I could have written a few years ago. I made the transition following a eerily similar same path. I did a PhD in experimental particle physics, then a postdoc offered though a Medical Physics Program (though not actually related to clinical radiation therapy) that I took largely because it allowed me to stay in a familiar location. I was stressed and needed a change. I was reading up on data scientist and data analyst positions but did not feel confident in applying.

I started attending software meetups in my city and chatting with folks. Meeting others in person was key for realizing the given the breadth and pace of the field, there would always be something new to learn so I needed to take the job posting "requirements" with some grains of salt. Someone encouraged me to attend a recruitment night his employer was hosting, and I figured it would at least be good interview practice. I ended up getting an offer and have been a Software Engineer for three years now. While the referral surely helped, the practice of explaining my experience to programmers at these events and learning where my skills were applicable and how to translate that into the jargon of the software boosted my confidence to actually attend the event and interview.

There were some rough patches at first, being thrown into a front-end project with practically zero experience in html and javascript, but in the end analysis code and front-end code are both debugged with breakpoints, test data and when that fails printing to the console. Recently I have been dusting off my analytical skills by playing with machine learning frameworks and hope to take my career in a direction that builds off both my academic and practical experiences.