Online Biology Bachelor’s Degree
A diverse field of study, biology can lead to several career paths: biomedical engineer, food scientist, and zoologist, to name a few. This guide offers suggestions to help you determine if an online biology degree is a good choice for you. This page considers applicable core skills, prospective industries, and some salaries attainable with an online bachelor's in biology.
What is Biology?
Earning an online biology degree represents a solid starting point for people interested in veterinary or human medicine, pharmaceuticals research, ecology, and more. While some of these career paths require graduate-level study, plenty of entry-level positions requiring only a bachelor's degree exist within industries that work with plants, animals, bacteria, food, and insects.
Advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in biology allow students to participate in interesting and potentially world-changing research. Whether you want to study evolution, agriculture, or bacteria, biology serves as a good starting place. A core science that helps us understand the world, biology -- like chemistry and physics -- has substantially improved modern technology and society.
What Can I Do with an Online Biology Bachelor's Degree?
These two sections provide you with an overview of the skills and knowledge you will gain from an online degree in biology, as well as possible careers and their accompanying salaries.
Skills and Knowledge Gained
What you learn while earning your online biology degree depends on your interests within this incredibly diverse field. If you have an idea of the career path you'd like to pursue, such as medicine or paleontology, you can focus your studies in those areas.
For example, medicine requires classes on human evolution, bacteria and infections, and human health. By studying the way cells work, you'll have a solid footing to understand how tissues and muscles work, thus giving you insight into how exercise, dehydration, or air pollution affect our bodies. At the same time, that groundwork also allows learners to study bacterial or viral infections and possible ways to prevent them.
If you wanted to follow a career path adjacent to biology, you might consider how your major can interact with a minor or with your elective courses. Perhaps you'd like to teach high school biology, in which case you can take courses on education and then go on to get a master's degree or teaching certificate. You could also study writing and rhetoric if you wanted to write science-related content in order to help people understand complex ideas through print or digital media. Again, biology provides students with a broad foundation of knowledge.
Careers and Salary Potential
An online bachelor's in biology can lead you down a limitless number of career paths. We've listed some industries and three specific careers you might consider. Use this section to start thinking about what you want to do with your degree.
- Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences: These fields require biologists of varying degree levels.
- Education: Institutions of higher education need biology instructors and professors; the same goes for high schools.
- Federal Government: Managing natural resources and combating pollution and global climate change require biologists.
- Pharmaceutical and Medicine Manufacturing: These areas necessitate biologists to figure out how to treat medical issues and how to make compounds needed to provide that treatment.
- Hospitals: All human medicine begins with biology, and while you need an advanced degree to practice medicine, an online biology degree serves as a good place to start.
Biological Technicians
Annual Median Salary: $43,800
Technicians work in labs and assist scientists in their experiments and the daily operations of that lab. Working in this manner can form a solid foundation for eventually designing and leading your own experiments.
Assistant Research Scientist
Annual Median Salary: $44,092
Part of a research team, these professionals generally focus on one area, such as repeating parts of an experiment to ensure they were not flukes.
Associate Research Scientist
Annual Median Salary: $62,881
These professionals guide experiments and research, and they also direct assistant researchers and technicians.
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