<p>Are you currently a math major or graduated with a math degree? Why did you pick math? How was your college experience pursuing your math degree? How many hours did you study a day? How many classes/credits a semester did you take? Any regrets? What would you do different if you started school again? If you already graduated with a math degree, what do you do for a living? </p>
<p>I plan to go back to school and major in math. I had to drop out of school for personal reasons and now I have a tremendous void in my life. Math has been my favorite subject and I want pursue a math degree. Any feedback or info would be great.</p>
<p>Ooh, I was a math major back in the day… it was a fine experience, but that is in part because the undergrad society was friendly and fun in a neurotic sort of way (that’s not always the case, as it changes every year). I picked math because I’ve always loved science but hated doing experiments (I’m sort of clumsy and hated manipulating dangerous substances in chemistry), so math offered the rigours of science without the annoying lab part. I went on to do grad school in statistics after realizing that the purely abstract parts of math were just too abstract for my taste, while statistics allowed me to play “in the backyard” of all other sciences. Hours of studying a day? Can’t remember (it varies a lot from course to course, from person to person), but at the end I remember spending most of my time (as in waking hours) on my numerical differential equations class and most of the rest on generalized linear models. I always took 5 courses per semester (to graduate in the minimum amount of time without taking summer courses), including 3, sometimes 4 in math and 1 in computer science (took a minor in that, it’s quite useful in most math programs to take at least a couple of CS courses, and in fact required in many places). Regrets? None really, except maybe that I should have worked harder early on on the basics (algebra and analysis) to get a better GPA.</p>
<p>What do I do for a living now. I managed to get a job in academia but it’s foolish to go in math to take that career path (unless you’re crazy good, and I’m not). The advantage of a math degree is that it really is versatile in the type of jobs you can get, because the skills you will learn out of it are useful in a wide number of places but at the same time not geared to doing one particular job. My own advice, if you want to find a job after your degree (instead of say, going to grad school), is to take a variety of pure and applied courses (including a decent amount of statistics, up to at least one course on regression). You need the pure courses to have a solid theoretical basis and the applied to understand how mathematics relate to the real world.</p>