Thanks again for this great answer.
At some points, when it feels right and would fit naturally into the moment, you may want to thank him and express your gratitude and appreciation for opportunities he has provided for you.
I hope I will be able to do this one day. By that, I mean that by a lot of my actions, I have not expressed my gratitude and appreciation for opportunities he has provided for me. While he was working for financing my studies, I have been using some of his money for going out, buying alcohol or drugs. I was not living a healthy life, not exercising, wasting too much time on watching movies or playing video games. Not so long ago I was still blaming my parents (or others) for my lack of self-esteem, bad habits... I only start to understand how to be truly responsible for myself and my own actions.
-> I hope I will be able to express my gratitude, when I truly
feel grateful.
Please do not create a weight or pressure on yourself in imaging that you must accurately forecast the optimal path.
Trying to do that has been causing some dose of suffering, headaches, overcomplicated thinking so far, and I am still learning to focus on the present, not the future (or the past).
Other forum members may have great tips and advice on analyzing the options before you now.
I'll take this as an opportunity to quickly talk about my motivations/aspirations. So since a few years I seem to have been a bit obsessed with the AI/ML/data science conglomerate. In my free time, I would read a lot about the subject. It came to a point where I was completely stuck, because I was seeing a lot of the possibilities that come with the methodology (e.g. biomedical image classification, detection of disease specific fingerprints in the human body (proteomics), applications in humanitarian development such as at
https://www.unglobalpulse.org/) and I had kind of lost hope because I didn't know how to get to a point where I might work in a related field, feeling strong guilt about not finishing engineering school, not feeling tough, mature or organized enough to quit psychology, make a fresh start and studying something new.
In my job as a research assistant in social science I had performed a cluster analysis; it took me a while to understand that this was a very first step, that I lack a lot of foundations in mathematics if I wanted to know how to analyse data (-> as a data scientist), and even more knowledge in mathematics and computer science if I want to develop algorithms.
I also saw that there a lot of areas in more advanced mathematics (e.g. topology, differential geometry) than seem to be relevant in certain cases. Intuitively, these are things I would like to explore.
There are also some overlaps with psychology (e.g. human-computer- interaction, human recommender systems...) but intuitively these are, in my "ideal world", not the thing I would be studying. I am simply kind of fed up with psychology.
So this was my main motivation behind bioinformatics. It seemed like a field I would be reasonably interested in - scientifically (and somehow also personally - my mother went through quite advanced breast cancer because it had not been recognized has been diagnosed with breast cancer which got into an advanced stage because the cancer had not been detected) would provide me with first skills in developing algorithms, and would probably give me diverse opportunities after finishing the program - either in gaining a PhD in the field, or working as a data scientist. However, I am still a bit uncertain if it is worth it to go for 2 more years of studying.
In essence, my heart tells me "mathematics. algorithms. find something where you can learn more about this and apply them usefully".
If you have any idea or experience in the field, and maybe have any other ideas where I might go with these ideas, I will happily take them.
If you think this is still me trying to figure out the "ideal path" - please warn me
.
Best,
Raphael
