Working Moms
jf198400
member
Math Major Careers (not teaching)
jf198400
member
in Working Moms
I graduated with a BS in Math and Computer Science 5 years ago and have been working as a software engineer since then. I would really prefer to change careers and do something that would use more of my math background. I am not interested in teaching, mainly b/c there are tons of unemployed teachers in our area. Just curious if anyone else on TB has a degree in math and what kind of career you have.
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Re: Math Major Careers (not teaching)
Interesting question...
is this helpful?
https://www.maa.org/careers/profiles.html
Finance/Accouting, Actuary, CPA
ETA my degree is not in math but these are options for you.
I have an undergrad in math and an ms in statistics. I work in sales forecasting - trying to predict sales for my company, which then drives the financial planning as well as the supply chain.
You could also get into the investment world - quantitative analysis and models, monte carlo simulations, etc.
I have a BS in Math, and I thought about being an actuary for like 5 mins... I just knew it wouldn't be for me. I actually work in Marketing, and there's a lot you can do with a Math background in Marketing. Analytics, forecasting, etc.
I don't use my degree every day, all the time, but it helps me to determine if data in our material make sense, I can understand the analytics I'm seeing and interpret the data, etc. It gives me a unique perspective that most of my colleagues don't have, and I think (hope) they appreciate that.
Good luck!
My husband and I both have BMath degrees (which for those in the know tells you what university we attended - >300 math graduates every year, man, my university crowd was fun), him with a major in CS, me with a major in Combinatorics and Optimization, with a minor in Pure Mathematics. I am back in school working on my PhD in computer science (sort of physics related, with a lot of bayesian stats) but before that, I worked doing "systems engineering", which included modeling some worst-case braking failures and communication latencies.I did some safety engineering work too, working out paths of failures and mean time to failure, and so on.
My husband works for a company that makes switching and routing software, his math-iness has helped him move into a role where he does more design and algorithms work, less coding. The timing stuff and failure modes does need a lot of analysis. Plus part of his job is blowing holes in other people's designs.
If you like stats, there's a lot of data mining related work. It involves some coding, but there's algorithm work and tweaking. (start with machine learning, a lot can be done with just singular value decomposition). Work involving computational linguistics or computer vision might be of interest too. Operations research or similar kinds of positions might suit you - I almost took a job related to industrial engineering, looking for optimizations in the supply and manufacturing chain. Sounded fun, was just in a far-flung suburb.
My current career aims are either to get a college/university teaching position, or moving back into a very analytic engineering role, probably in aviation or another safety-critical field (again, that's my background). I like failure analysis, and doing proofs of correctness on protocols.
(I can give more detail on what some of my friends are doing if you want - it's what comes from graduating from a school where a CS major requires more math classes than the average math major elsewhere.)
(Whew, that's a stream of consciousness! Can you tell I had a career crisis a few years back?)