22 soon, working in product, weird background, and considering cognitive science/neuro: How do I navigate this?
I’m approaching 22, graduating college this Sep, and currently working as a Product Owner.
My undergrad is in International Business, which is a plot twist since I came from a STEM background and competed in national-level Physics competitions in high school:)
I worked on a mental health project for about 2 years that I was really passionate about, and it made me care a lot more about things like metacognition, neuroplasticity, behavior change, etc. Based on feedback I’ve gotten from coworkers, friends, and mentors... I’ve realized that a lot of my strengths sit around understanding people, systems, behavior, and ambiguity. That’s why I got interested in product management in the first place. This job got me even think more about questions like: why do users behave this way? what are they really trying to do? how do we understand their decision-making, friction, motivation and mental models?
Recently, I’ve been wondering whether cogsci, computational neuroscience, neuroAI, or something adjacent might be a better long-term direction for me. I’ve watched some UC Berkeley lectures in cogsci to get a feel for the field, and I’ll be joining Neuromatch’s Computational Neuroscience program this July. Before this, I don't have much research experience during college, except for my graduation thesis.
My question is:
1/ How should I approach Neuromatch as a way to test whether this is just an interest or an actual career direction? I don’t just want to finish the course and say something like that was interesting. I want to use it to figure out whether my next step should be staying in industry and continuing to build product experience, or seriously considering grad school / a more academic transition into a field related to cognitive science or neuroscience.
2/ For people who have navigated multiple possible career paths, how did you know an interest was worth pursuing seriously? And how did you measure progress during the messy exploration stage?
3/ Any advice, personal experience, frameworks, warnings, or even questions I should be asking myself would be really appreciated.