My D likes math. She wants to pursue math in college. But because every college and university is going to have a math program, we don’t know if we should search for schools based on the math department alone. D doesn’t know what she wants to study. She has mentioned engineering, applied math (what IS that?), accounting, statistics, and computer science. So many different directions. How do we make a college selection that will expose her to the options available to her and help her decide what best fits her interests? This is hard!
My D is a math/chem double major (well, now, she keeps changing her mind and originally started out as a Bio/Math major lol). There are so many directions a Math major can take I think its important to choose a school that has lots of options: Applied math, economics, finance, etc. The one thing we did not consider when looking was a school that had some focus/classes on actuarial science, which requires very specific classes and testing. She is now glancing at engineering and her LAC does not have an engineering program but does have dual programs with other schools. If she had expressed any interest originally, she might have looked for that in the curriculum offerings as well. So, I guess in a nutshell, pick a school that has a broad base of math and computer science classes and consider whether they have engineering options as well.
Really doesn’t help you narrow the application list, does it? We felt the same way. Every place has math, how do we even choose? D knew she wanted a small school, but one with a larger math department (didn’t want to be in upper division math courses with the same 10-12 people every semester). SO…she asked about number of majors and class size in the upper division courses at every college visit. She also looked at the number of tracks there were for math majors. (Did not think about looking at econ or finance as those were in the business dept–but that’s very good advice).
D will finish a math major as she’s only got a few courses left, but will probably only do the minimum required for the major. But the math major requirement for a comp sci course really sent her in another direction. She added CS as a second major that is where her focus is right now.
In addition to looking for a school with a number of math-related majors, I’d say look for a school with broad distribution requirements that can’t be met with hs AP classes. It’s that exposure to something in college that can really ignite a student’s interest.
I think you want to look for colleges where a significant proportion of the math majors are women. Your D will want professors who are interested in mentoring women. Offhand, I know that Duke has an excellent reputation in terms of encouraging women math majors. Melanie Wood, the first American woman on the US Math Olympiad Team went there, and I think this may have strengthened their tradition. Having a significant number of women professors in the math department is also a good thing. Some of this you can tell just from the web site.
@ordinarylives, what do you mean by broad distribution requirements?
@QuantMech, you make a very good point. I had not thought of looking at the gender distribution of the students and the faculty in the math department. I love the idea of Duke, but that’s a hard one to get into!
a wide range of general education requirements.
My D majored in math looking solely at LACs. Lots of visits to find schools that resonated but had “good” math programs. Since she was not very advanced (Calc AB) coming out of HS we didn’t concern ourselves too much with having a large number of courses. It worked out very well. D loved her school and she found a great job after graduation (she was also in the running for top graduate in her class).
Thanks @NEPatsGirl. That’s good advice. Originally we were looking at LACs, but I think we might steer away from those to look at a bigger schools that have more options for math majors. So much to consider!
She is lucky, she just have to pick among best ranking schools she can get accepted at. Whichever seems like the best social, financial and geographical fit for her as most high ranking schools offer a sizeable buffet of interesting majors for a math enthusiast.
One career to consider is actuarial sciences. Actuaries make a HIGH salary and it is not a high-stress job. And most big companies need actuaries. The job outlook is very strong.
Don’t write off LACs entirely. It really depends on your student. You can go to a university with a large department and a fair number of majors and grad students, so there are lots of course offerings and a big community. Lots of students will thrive in that atmosphere, and if your student is pretty advanced going into college that’s the only reasonable way to go. But if your student isn’t entering college with a lot of previous exposure to high-level math and proof-based analysis, depending on her personality she could do better going to an LAC where it’s all very close and personal, and she would more or less get tutored by the faculty to get her to the point where she could do a master’s program at a university. (And of course if she were at that point, she might not have to do a master’s program at a university to get the kind of job math majors can get.)
An LAC is not likely to give her the courses she would need to pass an actuarial exam, if that’s the way she wanted to go, but neither would lots of universities. Unless she made that decision quite early, she would be looking at some kind of (short) graduate program either way. Which would be fine. And I think the same is true with lots of other specific math-related endeavors. If she knows early on that she wants to be expert in financial math, she could probably do that in most decent university math (or applied math) departments, and not so much in an LAC, but if she didn’t make that decision until late in her college career she could be in a perfectly good position coming out of an LAC with good preparation and strong support from her faculty.
Being a little over-simplistic: An important difference between universities and LACs is that at a university a professor’s job is to be expert in a particular field, and to teach students what’s hot in that particular field. Apart from whatever the department does to create requirements for graduating with the major, it’s the student’s responsibility, not that of any particular faculty member, to make certain the student gets all of her foundation in place. (Of course, if a student asks for faculty advice, she will usually get it, but she has to be willing to ask and sometimes to be good at asking.) At LAC’s, in small departments especially, the faculty usually takes a lot more personal responsibility for knowing the students who are majoring and figuring out what each of them needs to learn and to do to be successful.
The Women’s Colleges will tell you that there isn’t any gender bias at their schools for internships, research opportunities, etc. 
The offerings in the math department could be relevant in terms of her interest. Different math departments have different subarea emphases. Some may favor pure math (to prepare for PhD study), some may offer one or more of the applied math areas, and some may offer preparation for teaching high school math. Larger departments may offer more of these subareas.
If she is very advanced (college math courses beyond single variable calculus while in high school), then she may want to prefer schools with a strong graduate program in math, since she would be likely to want to take graduate level courses as an undergraduate (a few LACs do offer what appear to be graduate level math courses, even though they are undergraduate-only schools).
Applied math is math applied to problems like economics, computer science theory, operations research, statistics, (quantitative) finance, actuarial problems, etc…
Accounting does not generally use very advanced math, unlike some other subjects like statistics, operations research, economics, (quantitative) finance, engineering, and computer science theory.
Thanks so much @ucbalumnus. This is very helpful information.
My daughter liked Math in high school. When she got to college she looked at various majors including math, computer science, business/accounting, etc… She ended up majoring in math and then getting her teaching credential and is a high school math teacher. Of note, high school math and college math are, according to my daughter, completely different. My daughter was a good, but not great, high school math student, but ended up being a very good college math student. My son was a very good high school math student, but ended up not liking college math at all and changed his major.
Does your daughter take part in math contests like AMC etc? Those problems are more out of the box than standard high school math. A lot of math majors bail when they hit the proofs classes in college, and so the types of problems in the AMC contests can help her figure out her level of comfort with non routine problems. After the calculus sequence, the theoretical math courses are open ended and do not follow the template style learning of math that’s common in high school.
Before recommending the type of university, it would be helpful to know her stats.
Thanks @mathprof63. My daughter has some performance anxieties, so she has steered clear of math contests. I’ve tried to encourage her to participate, but she has resisted. Her math classes aren’t that advanced (Calc AB this year, Calc BC next), but she really likes Calculus. She has a 32 in math on the ACT (hope to get that up). She has a 4.2 GPA and is ranked 35th in her class of 635.
@clowncar, I would recommend your daughter try some old AMC math problems (for example: https://www.artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php?title=2016_AMC_12A_Problems). She can take her time; she’s not competing. It’s just to see if she finds these problems “fun”. Whether or not she can answer the problems correctly is almost beside the point but obviously if she can, that’s better. I imagine math majors would enjoy doing these types of problems. I think somewhere it is written that these problems can be solved with only a precalc background (?)
Great suggestion @SlackerMomMD. I’ll have her do that.