Ask HN: How does one get into natural science with a computer degree?

i did not, but your best bet is biology. biology is easy to learn, because knowledge branches out pretty fast, unlike physics where you need a whole undergraduate degrees worth of knowledge just to understand subdisciplines.

traditional biologists are not mathematicians - they wont expect you to know much about computers, therefore you are "overqualified" at least in your area of expertise.

biology has a whole bunch of unsolved problems in areas like protein folding, that are basically problems in mathematics. in order to understand those, you dont really have to be a biologist, but if you spend a couple months studying the underlying biology, you will be good enough.

degrees in "bioinformatics" are popping up everywhere, because they need computer scientists who know a couple things about biology.

and you get to tell yourself that you are a small cog in the machine that works towards a world that is free of disease. if thats what you want to do, i'd go into biology.

how do you get there? apply for jobs. maybe rearrange your resume a bit in such a way that it says "numerical simulations" instead of "iphone apps".

You should experiment with different things before pivoting.

Some classmates of mine did from college, I believe the way they started was in writing software/models with researchers in their field of interest. Developing their missing domain knowledge along the way, and I believe each went on to get graduate degrees in their new field after that start (or in CS, but their research was clearly in modeling the other domains). Not in touch with any of them anymore so I can't be more specific, this is the gist as I recall it.

I am in a similar boat. I am exploring the bioinformatics side and computational statistics. I am very interested in hearing other's experience deviating from traditional software development into the other sciences.