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I'm doing something similar. I got undergraduate degrees in CS and business and worked 5 years for a large corp right out of school. I saved my money and, using a rollover for business startup, I funded my business. I'm lucky enough to have a 2-earner household and a partner that is giving me time to figure out where I want to go next. I've been on "sabbatical" for a little over a year. I've had a couple false starts with respect to the business. In the last couple weeks I've decided that I too wanted to level-up on my hard skills but away from CS. I've never been too enamored with trying to sell a product or service that had a lower barrier to entry for competitors. Too much convincing and pitching and , uggh, selling for my tastes. I've always been interested in Chemistry so I decided to teach myself using textbooks. I realized a while ago that if you have an interests in a subject strong enough to keep you reading and working through a textbook, you can learn anything to a high level because hiding in the pages of a college textbook is the knowledge of many decades of human discovery, engineering, and passion as well hundreds of hours of hours of lecturing, teaching, and even tests (assuming you buy the answer manual). Almost any college course you'll ever take will be a watered-down, rushed meander through a couple chapters in a textbook. If you are willing to go through those chapters, in full, and do most or all of the exercises, you can learn basically anything on your own to a undergrad or graduate (MS) level. And if you're fortunate enough, as I have been, to be able to fund your own company, your lack of degree doesn't matter because you don't need to signal to anyone that you know what your doing because you are doing the hiring. Granted for what I'm trying to do, I will hire a person with a degree to "head up" my labs for outside credibility's sake. |