Unsure what to pursue

[SolarKat]

You brought up research jobs the other day. It might be something I could aim for. I would guess many of them would need someone to sit at a computer, but not be as math related as analytics? I am hoping.

Hm, that's a complex question...and I think you're likely to just "stumble into" that sort of job. I've seen lawyers looking for "researchers" to visit courthouses and go through legal files for them. I've seen small businesses looking for very part-time "analysts" to run numbers on their inventory/operations weekly (like 8 hours a week, just going in and running reports). Companies have social media/marketing people who do online research looking for competitors, or tracking mentions/buzz. Medical groups here use "researchers" to collect information from study participants, in hospitals working with files/data, with teams rummaging through literature (journals, etc) looking for possible new compounds to test for their own uses. Small businesses exist that track government/agency grants and recipients, such as award winners in the SBIR programs, where literally they research companies and create a database of participants/skills/projects which they then sell access to, for companies looking for partners. So online research is a huge thing...but something you're likely to hit upon by chance, or by scouting local involved companies/groups/sectors in your region, or by going to conferences.

Beyond that, you mention data and math. You don't necessarily need to be a math rock star, because software does most of the heavy lifting for a lot of analytics. Some parts of data science are heavy on the computer science - those are the folks creating the new algorithms to build better AI, for example. Other aspects are heavy on the data processing - database queries, structures, etc. And some are more functional - taking a data set and turning it into pretty visualizations that tell the story the company wants to tell its customers, partners, etc. Anything from analyzing a person's FB network as part of exploring communicable disease epidemiology, or perhaps running numbers on a company's prosthetic hip, or a manufacturer looking at how to optimize their production line - how much faster can they make something, or how fewer rejects, before the costs outweigh the benefits. How can UPS plan the drivers' routes for minimizing gas expenses as well as delivery times. All of these questions don't rely so heavily on knowing the math going on "under the hood" but on how to utilize software packages (and really, having a good sense of the industry/sector you're analyzing) to reveal meaningful relationships (as production time decreases, production volume increases, for example), and to create graphs/charts/reports that explain the info in a way the target audience understands. Software is letting us get super high tech with this - just in medicine, for example, they can examine survival rates in much more complexity...beyond a "this medicine vs that medicine" approach, to include all sorts of variables...and that's making better treatment protocols (healthcare) and survival predictions (actuary science) and cost estimates (insurance, HR finance, etc).

So I wouldn't let a fear of math keep you from analytics, generally speaking.