Everyone preaches that being an actuary is the only thing you can do with a math major. Are there any other jobs Math Majors can get? Is there money if I graduate in this field?
If you did computational mathematics, you can usually go for computer science (call it “Computer Science and Mathematics” on your resume, which is not untrue and only slightly misleading) - it’s a bit roundabout and you might be better off just doing straight-up CS, but if you do advanced work your stronger math fundamentals will do you good. If you do statistics, you can do business work, including but not limited to actuarial science. You probably would want to take finance and economics for this. Pure math, you’ll have a bit of trouble finding your way and I don’t know any particularly clever career paths there (but you do have quantitative skills that people want).
So in short, yes math majors do have value, but you really have to plan it through and go in with a more focused system than what the major requires you to do.
The other direction is to get a teaching credential and teach high school math.
Or get a PhD and try for academic and research jobs.
An undergrad college degree is generally not a vocational degree (unless you are going straight into business or engineering)
You do math because you love math. Period. It’s 4 years of your life in which you can study whatever you want without feeling the pressures of the outside world.
That is what a college education was initially meant to be and as I believe it, what the point of college is.
What other time do you have to study your passions without being distracted besides college? Within 4 years of studying math in college, it’s possible that you might study more math than you ever could if you had never did a math major during your undergraduate.
That said, don’t worry too much about jobs for math. Sure, directly, math majors don’t really have that much of a lucrative job besides actuary (which is very lucrative btw).
However, companies usually initially hire you for the skills you learn in college and for your ability to be social as you will be relearning for your job at work anyways. (Don’t forget, less than 24% stay in their major upon graduation. So, … you want a degree that can serve you well broadly, not one that focuses in exactly one and leaves you confused on the rest)
Anyways, I find it common that most math majors nowadays double major or minor (plus take a lot of high level CS/math courses) in CS
It’s either that or the math majors usually end up also learning some econ.
Business companies love math majors for their ability to think critically and their ability to manipulate numbers well (which is ironic since higher math don’t contain much numbers, even in number theory).
And for CS/IT related fields, well… as long as you can think logically (which I believe proofs excel at), then you won’t have as much disadvantage as you think. <as most=“” of=“” time,=“” you=“” have=“” to=“” pick=“” up=“” the=“” language=“” by=“” yourself.=“” good=“” universities=“” don’t=“” teach=“” all=“” languages.=“” that’s=“” your=“” job=“”>
And if you want to pursue as mathematician, then I guess a math PhD.
Applied Mathematician if you enjoy the more applied areas.
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/mathematicians.htm
Pure mathematicians if you enjoy the theoretical aspect (which as much as I hate to admit, a disproportionate amount of math majors do but at the same time they recognize the field is much harder to survive in getting a career):
Just your everyday pure math professors
Or you could become a teacher, or lawyer
And if you always wanted to learn math but you want to do engineering at a certain point…
math undergrad => engineering grad
cause well, most engineering grad is funded anyways 
That’s what most physics majors I see do anyways. They take 4 years of what they truly love and then decide whether they want to stick to it or go pursue an engineering. And it seems none regrets their decisions and if given the chance of undergrad again, they would again stick to the path.
If you truly love math, give it a try.
It’s really a beauty.Don’t miss out on such an opportunity over “is there no hope in this path?” before trying.
After all, mathematics is the fundamental for all things 
It is the “language of the universe”
And trivial thinkings are sometimes trivial.
That said, it also depends where you attend as an institution as your first career.
For instance, in Columbia Uni, a disproportionate amount of applied math majors would do interns at morgan stanley, etc.
I’m sure different universities have different biases in careers for math majors (as much as I hate to admit).
Anyways, the advantage of math is that you can remain flexible. If you are confident you can use that as an advantage, then try it. Otherwise, well, still try it and see whether you like it or not.
Cause you are still not at college. Why are you already crossing off certain majors without giving it a go?
And cmon, isn’t the happiest ranked job #1 a mathematician or actuary or computer scientist each year? Theoretical computer science is pretty much math. Actuary is pretty much brute force applied math. Mathematician is math. 
At least in terms of happiness level, mathematicians rank in the top if that matters to you… so that must mean they fare pretty good in the real world. Anyways, take as a grain of salt but Forbes rank math degrees within the top 10~11 best.So if other people are getting jobs, I don’t think you are at too much of a disadvantage.
Now, will you need to be more active than a student with an engineering degree? Sure. But then again, he is specializing, you are not. And he is missing out on some enlightening ideas the world has ever come up with.
He is missing out on that supreme beauty of mathematics
And surprisingly, engineers’ starting salary in reputable universities aren’t really “so high” compared to other majors. Like for my university, engineers only start like 5 thousand higher than business guys in undergrad. And engineering salary tends to cap really fast so o.O
Plus, no one knows the future so ya… we can’t really say which degree is lucrative or not. Because 5 years from now, it’s possible that engineering might be overflooded and so on. Really… no one knows if your degree will be directly important or anything. So ya… you do a math m ajor for the beauty and to learn the skills of critical thinking and writing from mathematics. o.O now that serves you a lifetime even if you forget what Calculus is
Let’s not wax philosophical when a degree has a lot to do with the quality of the rest of your life. While it is true that college is a great time to try out a lot of fields and to learn interesting topics, it’s also the time where you learn the skills that you need to have to build your career. Want to learn some unusual math? Great, do it. But don’t forget to have a plan for how that’s actually going to be useful.
A lot of what is stated here about what mathematicians can do is simply wrong. The amount of work that it takes to learn actuarial math, or good software design, or economics, or physics, is very much nontrivial. People spend years learning this material and while having a solid math background helps a lot, the rest is not just stuff you can gloss over.
Take it for what it is: a balancing act.
You can work in Finance or in Contract. My daughter’s roommate was a math major in college and she ended up working in contract. Sometimes she doesn’t like the work and thinking about switching to law school.
You have to own your career. When you are unemployed and depressed or stuck in a job you hate or don’t like, you can’t say to yourself but but somebody on the internet told me this and that. It’s your life and you have to do the best job at balancing these suggestions.
My advice: double major or try to pick the right major the first time.
You don’t want to find yourself going back to school spending more money on another degree because you were unsatisfied with the possibilities of what you can do with your current degree. And if you do go back to school, make sure you do it right this time by getting a very high GPA, etc. I cannot tell you how much of a pain it is to juggle a full-time job and a full-time course load. When your schedule works out where you can take classes mostly after work or online, great. Other than that, it can get real hectic real fast, especially when you’re moving into a more responsible role at work. I am the “leader” of my troubleshooting team and responsible for them not screwing things up in production, helping them with any roadblocks they face, and anything the customer escalates. So you have to take care of them plus your own work and then whatever household needs after left after work and school.
The most useful thing I learned from doing a mathematics degree was that I find statistics really boring (can’t be an actuary), that I would never enjoy teaching children (can’t be a high school teacher or less), and that I really don’t want to get a PhD in math (can’t be a professor). If you like statistics, be an actuary. I am currently tutoring some psychology graduate students in statistics to help them with their grad stats classes.I also find that I use arithmetic and some very basic statistics in my day job developing software. Now, being able to reason abstractly is highly useful in this, but you don’t need to major in math to have good reasoning. I think there’s just a tendency for you to be a bit quicker at it.
Most math majors become software engineers, software technicians, software “something”.
As a math major (well, there’s a difference between someone who is a math major that can actually graduate from the major but whatever), I feel like you’re smart enough to do most jobs other people do with some training. That being said, you’d need to find an employer who would put their investment into your training, which is not a lot of them I feel like.
I’m going back to school and have read a lot about people being unhappy with the ways thing turned out after their first degree. Sometimes that’s just life.
I know two or three math majors who are working in controls engineering. One of them is even pure math, the others may be applied math. People talk about them with a certain amount of awe and bewilderment. Some combination of deep respect and a plain “that ain’t right.”
Way back when, my alma mater offered a mix of applied math and CS, with enough physics to be useful. Lots of mathematical modeling. I like approaching engineering problems as numerical puzzles rather than the way most of the ME and EE’s I work with do. And while sometimes I wish I’d majored in either math or CS, after nearly 30 years, I’m really satisfied with it and use parts of it nearly every day.
If my daughter wanted to study applied math, I wouldn’t discourage it. If she wanted to minor in CS and take 10-15 hours of physics, I’d think that a very potent set of raw materials with which to forge through life.
Acccreate’s advice is coming from a very idealist college student place (and likely someone who doesn’t have to pay for college) without the benefit or work or life experiences. I disagree with most of it. “Business Companies”, gives me a chuckle… All companies are businesses.
OP, Unless you are POSITIVE you want to go to grad school (which most people aren’t, especially since it costs a fortune) choose a major or dual major or major/minor combination that has a high chance of a career in something you would be remotely interested in. If you are like @Caldud (and like me) and come to the realization that you wouldn’t want to be a high school teacher, think stats is boring, don’t want a PHD (more teaching) then likely straight Applied Math is not the easiest path into the business world, Engineering, CS, etc… Also, if this Math degree is costing you and/or your parents $200K, and you come out of it with no job prospects, what can you see yourself doing then? If grad school - great. If not, expand your major horizons.
The most miserable people I know in the workplace are the ones that have high level grad degrees or PHDs from top schools, and are working in average pay jobs alongside ‘lowly’ and ‘less worldly’ state school colleagues. The sense of superiority seeps from within.
Sorry, Nicole, I didn’t answer your question. I don’t know what you can clearing transition to with a math major other than teaching or actuary jobs.
Seems like the common career directions where math majors go include:
- finance or actuarial
- high school math teacher (after teaching credential)
- college math instructor or research (after PhD)
- operations research (manufacturing processes, supply chains, etc.)
- computer software
Obviously, careful selection of electives in and out of one’s major can help with any of these career directions.
I’m getting a sense of hostility toward the math major in this thread. I double majored in math and computer science (and minored in economics) and in my experience the math major has helped me the most.
A math major opens up more doors than probably any other major. As a general rule, the math major lets you do anything an economics major could do (and more, and be more competitive at it). Both law schools and med schools love math majors (though for med school you’ll need to take certain required courses), and PhD programs in both the social and hard sciences adore math majors. It’s true that for many jobs, you’ll want to take a few courses in that area to supplement your math major, but you don’t necessarily need to double major or even minor.
Overall, I highly recommend the math major to anyone that enjoys it and is good at it.
Some other jobs that you can do as a math major:
Computer programmer
Data scientist
Quantitative finance (hedge funds)
US Senator (maybe not first job out of college though)
Cryptographer
In fact you can do pretty much any job that doesn’t require a specific degree (engineering, law, doctor).
“Acccreate’s advice is coming from a very idealist college student place (and likely someone who doesn’t have to pay for college) without the benefit or work or life experiences. I disagree with most of it. “Business Companies”, gives me a chuckle… All companies are businesses.”
O.o
I had 2 partime work from my first semester of college while handling 18 credits off the bat in which many of my courses had juniors/seniors.
I have an older sibling who is facing the job outlook of college graduates right now.
I had experienced how it feels for your parents to be fired.
I have friends who are taking almost 6 figures of debt by the end of their graduations for a college degree.
I think I very much know that college in the States is currently more or less a scam.
Anyways, if you think pessimistic, you are only going to see pessimistic so…
that said, note that I am pretty much also majoring in Computer Science. And I did say in my rather lengthy post that many math majors I know are doing econ or cs as a back up to their major.
No degree nowadays warrant anything. Nothing. Not even engineering.
In fact, I think engineering is going to be overpopulated very soon with the sudden hype in the sciences in which the actual data does not imply (it actually implies the opposite saying that there are too many students in the sciences for the past decade already… )
Anyways, math major is a solid major.
It’s more solid than almost every other major that most college offers. And I think that’s what is important.
Companies look more favorable at a math diploma than most others as it is seen as a major which you can’t “bs your way through”.
Also, you never know the job outlook in a few years upon your graduation. Already, many are speculating that programming is the new McDonald working of tech. Kinda sad how the world has become right? Ehh.
Thank you all for all the feedback! I also want to ask, when looking for your first job, how much does GPA matter? As of right now, I am almost completed with my math degree and have around a 3.5 cumulative GPA with a 3.4 major GPA. Do companies really look at this as a big factor in their decision making for who they want to hire?
GPA may be a factor in whom they bring in for interviews. For example, an employer may want to interview only those with GPA >= 3.0.