This is going to be a long post, so skip to the TL;DR if you want...
OP, I posted in your other thread but what you're going through, I went through something similar as well, so I thought I should post my experiences as well.
I was also 30 years old when I hit the "What the **** am I going to do with my life?" wall... first, the back story:
I graduated from a small liberal arts school in Michigan with a degree in Biology... my original intention had been to go to medical school, mostly because of parental pressure. Sure, I thought it was interesting, but my heart just wasn't in it. But I had no idea what else to do... so I felt trapped... my grades began to suffer (almost got kicked out once). I did well on my MCATs, but knowing that my grades would hold me back... I never applied.
Instead, I took my Biology degree and worked as a research technician. For almost 8 years, I worked in various labs... Just FYI, as a research technician, you're considered skilled labor but you're also rather far down on the totem pole. You're there to support the Principal Investigator, the postdocs, graduate students... pretty much, besides undergrads, you're at the bottom. You don't really get to control anything. And for me, I really began to hate that I wasn't in a position to control the direction of my own research. So for 8 years I worked as a research technician, hating 80% of my life... and feeling like I couldn't do anything about it (see grades above).
I got married to my college sweetheart, and she saw how I was suffering... but she also saw how much I loved computers. My response was like some of the others in this thread, "No way, I don't want to ruin what I love with work...". In fact, this wasn't even the first time I had been told to combine what I loved (computers) with what I was good at (research)... I had been told by a couple of my bosses to look into bioinformatics. And like my response to my wife, I would always say "Sure, I'll look into it... in a few years."
Then a couple things came together that really gave me that final push... 1) having a crappy boss, 2) hitting that point of "what am I going to do with my life?", and 3) being asked to analyze some computational data at work... again, just for your information: one of the major revolutions in experimental research has been the use of high-throughput computational resources to look at complex biological processes in different ways. This has lead to all sorts of innovations in biology and medicine (ex. personalized medicine through sequencing), but what spoke most to me was the idea that experimental research could be guided and made more efficient by computational resources. Experiments that had previously required months if not years to plan and execute, could be streamlined to a matter of months, if not weeks.
That was it, I was hooked. But what about my grades? No graduate school would ever take me with those grades, I thought. So, I re-took some classes at the local CC, and since I'd never programmed before I took some extra classes in Java and C++ to get some experience and a feel for it all.
Armed with these new grades and classes, I applied for PhD programs in Bioinformatics across the country... and I was rejected by every single one. At that point, I just about gave up... my grades must have been just that bad for not one school to take a chance on me. But then, I swallowed my pride and I e-mailed a couple schools if they would instead consider me for their Master's programs. I got in.
1.5 years later, I graduated a semester early with a M.S. in Bioinformatics from the University of Michigan. I could have stopped there, probably would have been able to find a nice job in a lab or in the industry make double or even triple what I had made before... but I had gotten the bug. I was really hooked... I wanted more. I wanted to be on the cutting edge, making a contribution to the scientific community, but most of all... I felt that I wanted to be in even more control. I wanted to share my ideas, and if they were good, see them put into action as meaningful research. So I applied for PhD programs... and what do you know, I'm starting my PhD in Bioinformatics in the Fall.
Now, maybe you're path isn't in computers... you'll have to figure that out for yourself. Maybe you can use part of your warehouse job experience to shape a part of your future. Maybe as someone who has done all the nitty gritty, you've begun to recognize some of inefficiencies in your job. Maybe you could become a process engineer? Maybe you had a few experiences supervising other people... maybe you could get a degree in management? It's all really up to you.
For me, it was coming to the realization that I wasn't going to ruin what I loved (computers) by making it part of my life's work (bioinformatics). I wil say that the one thing I don't get to do anymore, that I used to love doing, was playing video games almost non-stop. But to tell you the truth, I don't even really miss it that much... because the computational problems that I run into everyday, solving those puzzles are more fun to me now and more gratifying than doing some quest in Borderlands. Sure, I still game every now and then... still play Torchlight every so often... but to me, work is almost as fun, if not more so... which I would definitely have never thought I would actually say a few years ago.
A couple of other tips to help you on your way...
- You're going to be one of the older students in your classes, but don't worry... people like us are becoming more and more common, and sometimes you'll find classes with people even older than you (I had a lady who was easily into her 50's in a Complex Systems class that I took).
- Don't get discouraged (re: my PhD application failure, above). If you know what you want, keep working at it. In my case, I eventually learned that it wasn't even so much about my grades... but that I had been out of school for so long. Basically, they wanted me to prove myself... that I could handle graduate school. When I asked to be considered for the Master's program, two schools accepted me within a couple weeks.
TL;DR
- hit 30, thought "wtf am I going to do with my life?"
- took classes, applied to PhD programs and got rejected
- applied to Master's program, finished early, got accepted to PhD programs the second time around
- ???
- profit
