From rusin@vesuvius.math.niu.edu Mon May 31 00:42:06 CDT 1999 Article: 254159 of sci.math Path: news.math.niu.edu!rusin From: rusin@vesuvius.math.niu.edu (Dave Rusin) Newsgroups: sci.math Subject: Re: math degree Date: 25 May 1999 08:01:48 GMT Organization: Northern Illinois Univ., Dept. of Mathematical Sciences Lines: 72 Message-ID: <7idldc$9ie$1@gannett.math.niu.edu> References: <19990521003754.11236.00004447@ng-fp1.aol.com> <37479a6c.16123328@news.total.net> <7icgd0$9bs$1@juliana.sprynet.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: vesuvius.math.niu.edu X-Trace: gannett.math.niu.edu 927619308 9806 131.156.3.93 (25 May 1999 08:01:48 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@math.niu.edu NNTP-Posting-Date: 25 May 1999 08:01:48 GMT Xref: news.math.niu.edu sci.math:254159 On 21 May 1999 04:37:54 GMT, rightwill@aol.com (RIGHTWILL) wrote: >I was thinking about going back and finishing my degree in math or >comp.sci., I was just wondering waht the job market was like for >mathematicians. Are there plenty of good paying jobs????? In article <7icgd0$9bs$1@juliana.sprynet.com>, kent wrote: >Regarding your future employment prospects, you could >hardly pick a worse degree than Mathematics. Even, say Art History, is >probably better. If you don't believe me, check out any employment agency, >classified ads, etc., and see what the demand is for Mathematicians. Zilch. >Nada. The empty set. Not quite. Pick up a copy of SIAM News -- the newsletter of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. There you'll find plenty of job listings for mathematicians. The work is hard but the demand is strong and so the pay is good. Prospective mathematics students should be aware of a couple of points. First off, there are indeed very few jobs in which a person can earn a living doing more or less the same activities as a math student. For these jobs a Ph.D. in Mathematics in necessary but not sufficient; some 5-12% of new Ph.D.'s in recent years were unable to find satisfactory employment immediately upon completing the degree. If you intend to pursue this line of work you are well advised to start reading the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, which carries both job ads and news about the profession. On the other hand, I don't see why it should be terribly surprising that few people can get a job doing just what they did as students. Many young people spend incredible time and effort honing particular skills which they cannot use directly to earn a living. There are fewer players on the rosters of the National Basketball Association teams than there are mathematicians at Ph.D.-granting institutions; yet people happily dribble basketballs for hours. And how much does your typical sculptor earn? The average air-guitarist? The common novel-analyzer? Yes, there are professions for which a particular post-secondary education constitutes adequate job preparation -- medicine and law come to mind. But most people do not enter these fields. Rather, most people find their own opportunities in life, opportunities which are individual enough that it would be difficult to design a preparation program anyway. That sculptor may one day gain fame from her work, but in the meantime her artistic training may be just the thing to get her a job designing web sites in the new economy. (Oh, and by the way, _now_ SPELLING COUNTS!) Likewise for the holder of the math degree: it may happen that you'll prove a great theorem some day and earn eternal fame. In the mean time, you'll find that if your mathematical preparation is good enough, your interests wide enough, and your work habits good, then you should be able to find employment working in a setting you like. Many of our graduates get jobs in software and teaching, of course, but there are plenty who have found good careers in statistics and actuarial work, consulting, experimental design, the publishing world, and so on. The Mathematical Association of America has a number of publications about employment in mathematics, and they try to make the same point: a degree in mathematics _is_ a great way to prepare for a job, but it's probably not going to be a job labeled "Mathematician" and served up in a tidy package. You can visit the web sites of these organizations to learn something about what mathematics study can do for you: http://www.siam.org http://www.ams.org http://www.maa.org These remarks are directed at US students but I believe they're more or less applicable in other countries too. dave From bitbucket@home.com Tue Dec 21 23:48:25 CST 1999 Article: 290240 of sci.math Path: news.math.niu.edu!husk.cso.niu.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!news.crhc.uiuc.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!newsfeed.berkeley.edu!enews.sgi.com!feeder.via.net!newshub1.home.com!news.home.com!news1.frmt1.sfba.home.com.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Richard I. Pelletier" Newsgroups: alt.algebra.help,sci.math Subject: Re: Some more degree help for me Message-ID: <021219972119487654%bitbucket@home.com> References: <83cjot$ot4$1@fir.prod.itd.earthlink.net> <83l70j$1qp$1@oak.prod.itd.earthlink.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit User-Agent: YA-NewsWatcher/3.1.7 Lines: 56 Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 05:18:00 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.1.84.65 X-Complaints-To: abuse@home.net X-Trace: news1.frmt1.sfba.home.com 945839880 24.1.84.65 (Tue, 21 Dec 1999 21:18:00 PST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 21:18:00 PST Organization: @Home Network Xref: news.math.niu.edu sci.math:290240 In article <83l70j$1qp$1@oak.prod.itd.earthlink.net>, "Prince Familiar" wrote: > Wow, I really have a lot of opinions to go on here and I think I may have > made the right decision, at least taking into account all the advice given > here... > Well ... Without a PhD, and outside of academia, if you want to do math, I think it's got to be _applied_, and then the people who interview you need to believe that you care about the their work. I got a B.S. in Math in 1971, an M.S. in 1972. I did take a fair amount of physics, but I can't see that pure physics classes are a whole lot more practical than math. Oh, I started as a EE, and the freshman engineering catch-all class included drafting and FORTRAN. (That was the only programming class I ever took.) I hung around graduate school for two more years. In 1974 I got a job writing FORTRAN for a couple of economics professors. Started taking econ classes. In 1976 I got a job doing operations research, and kept taking econ. In 1981 I went to work in process control & instumentation. Turned out to be a key job, even though it didn't last long. In 1982 I went to work in a university computer center, and learned a whole lot of applications packages. In 1987 I went to work for a startup, modeling power plants running on water-ammonia mixtures. What got me into the interview was "thermodynamic properties" in process control. Now I'm the co-author of two patents, and working on more. Finally, I majored in math simply because I liked it. I had switched out of EE into physics because the engineers kept saying, "The physicists tell us that the equations are ....". I switched out of physics into math because the physicists kept saying, "The mathematicians tell us that the solution to this equation is ...." The simple fact is I love mathematical models, and I've managed to work at it one way or another. Vale, Rip -- Multiplication is not commutative before breakfast. Richard I. Pelletier NB eddress: r i p 1 [at] h o m e [dot] c o m