Career/ Master's Degree advice

Hello all, I have been reading this subreddit for some time and thought I would finally ask for some career advice. I have a bachelor’s degree in biology and 8 years of experience doing wet bench work. I have worked on everything from quantifying images and developing techniques for calculating intensity to doing some cheminformatics in another lab. I’ve come to really like the bioinformatics side of my bench work and want to pursue it as a career, but it’s a really broad field. So far I have taken two edx courses in Java and have been practicing programming. I’ve applied to a few online master’s programs which at this point I think is my best bet as I’m approaching my 30s looking to start a family soon and don’t want to start a PhD program.

I’m looking at Brandeis, which has a program that uses R and python and has a pretty balanced course load, with both sequence analysis vs structural docking. The other school I’m looking at is Northeastern. It has a pretty standard program as well (uses Pearl), but you can also get a certificate for Data Analytics by choosing your electives wisely. It has more fun electives (many more) which delve into databases and machine learning and just more topics overall but you only get so many. But I am guessing I can take some edx classes and self-learn some of those things. To get to the point is the Data Analytics certificate worth 12K more over Brandeis? What should I do to future-proof my degree/ what courses should I concentrate in with this large growing field? Does anyone have any experience with either program?