ntwhtyouknw said:
I'd like to be a botanist or ethnobotanist, really I just want to have a real career that I can have some passion for. I was told with a BS in biology lots of doors would be open to further my education, but it would be difficult to get a job with only the BS. As long as I could work with plants and or chemistry and not end up doing anything that would feel unethical to me like pharma or animal testing I think I could be happy. School is all so foreign to me, I'm really kind of clueless. The counselors weren't very concerned with helping me understand what i was doing, more so with filling my schedule and getting me out of their office it seemed. So I just really am trying to move in the right direction and hopefully end up with an education that will lead me on a happier career path.
Maybe one day psychedelic psychotherapy will be a career option but until them I'd like to be as close as I can to it.
I guess I just really want to be helpful and do so with plants.
So I take it that you want to be working in a lab, maybe doing research like going onto expeditions, collecting and learning about plants, possibly analysing them too kind-of-thing. For such a thing you definitely want a Masters on top of your BSc. Put it bluntly, what the BSc degree tells is that you're too "good" now for low end jobs, so you do not need to do cleaner/macdonalds cashier/courier etc jobs. With the BSc you can be a salesperson, macdonalds manager, bank clerk. And with the MSc (by research) in Biology you often commit to more academic career and get you deeper in your preferred subject.
If you like doing just the above stuff, you may want to consider going for plant phylogenetics, bioinformatics and also a good touch of ecology - you'll be collecting plants, analysing their DNA and categorising them, and you'll maybe be discovering new species. You might be also getting to decipher plant-plant relations and how they fit in an ecosystem. Albeit interesting, such orientations often get horrible funding and thus you may need to fight a lot for placements.
Otherwise, a more biochemistry/chemistry orientation will allow you to get deep into plant's chemicals and discover new ones- check the Natural Products sciences which does just that. And if you want to be testing plant-derived chemicals you'll need to get into pharmacology/cell culture/molecular biology orientations. Mind you, with the latter you'll be mostly a lab person knee-deep into experiments and you may not ever get the chance of holding a living plant in your whole career.
Finally, if you want to go into study of plants per se, like investigating how do plants grow and flower, what determines optimum soil for a given species, how plants deter pathogens (fungi, insects etc), how plants form relationships with other species etc then you need to go for Plant Sciences. Note though that most of Plant Science people and funding is directed to understanding and improving current crop plants, so you might find yourself working in things you may not like, such as developing pesticides for crop plants or making transgenic plants.
Benzyme's advice of trying to get as much as techical experience is an excellent one!
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