<p>Ok so sorry if this is the wrong section to be posting this in but I feel like engineers could provide the best response. I am currently in the civil/electrical engineering departments at my big state school and while I find it extremely challenging I also find it very rewarding. But of late I have began to consider other options which might be available to me, and in specific changing my major to mathematics. I have easily passed and thoroughly enjoyed Calc 1/2/3 already and I am about to start up DiffEQ.</p>
<p>So here's what I am looking for in response to this thread. If I changed my major to math what career options are out there for me. I have kind of preemptively decided that if I do change I would try to get my masters in math as well. Looking at the upper level courses I think I would enjoy most of them and although I don't want to be a teacher per say (even though its always an option) do you think in the future there will be jobs for actuaries/cryptology/ or other related fields and if there are available jobs how easily do you think they can be obtained.</p>
<p>I guess in general if you don't want to read this ugly wall of text I am asking what the future looks like for mathematicians not interested so much in teaching (but always keeping it an option).
Come<em>Sail</em>Away is online now</p>
<p>Hi there, I’ve been jumping around majors and math is the one solid in all of them. I just love it! Which is funny because I hated it through middle and high school lol. I actually did a 180, I went from hating math and loving english to loving math and hating english.</p>
<p>I think I’m going to do a mathematics major and do some at home IT training so I have something to fall back on if my plethora of ideas for a math major don’t pan out.</p>
<p>That’s a little history on myself. Since I decided on math as a major I have been asking the same question you have and I found a great site, though I don’t know how accurate or reliable it is >.<</p>
<p>This site is from a college I’ve never heard of, but the ideas for what you can do with a math major seem pretty interesting so I will let you see for yourself. The school is called Westfield State College, not sure where that is or how well known it is. I hope this helps you. Here is the link.</p>
<p>Be very careful when making the decision to become a “math major”. While knocking Calculus and other lower divison mathematics out of the water is a positive, it isn’t really representative of what you will actually be doing in upper division coursework. Lower division is all computational (except for a few bits in Linear Algebra) - Upper division is all theoretical and is generally where the folks who’ve said they love math and have always been good at it - find out what they really meant was they were good at algebra, and formulae. Not to dissuade you, but just make sure you are prepared that skills learned in Calc. are not neccesarily going to translate to abstract algebra or real (complex) analysis success. </p>
<p>As for what jobs - I think a person would have the most success if they specialize. Definitely there will always be positions for [url=<a href=“http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos041.htm]actuaries[/url”>http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos041.htm]actuaries[/url</a>]. I would say if you major in math, and perhaps start looking at some finance/business classes - you’d be fine for entry level work; even more so if you decide to do graduate work in mathematical finance. If that is an option for you - you’d be looking for more of the applied math side of things - so upper division probability/stats, numerical analysis maybe, maybe a class on regression analysis (stats) if your school offers it.</p>
<p>Really depends on what job you might want to do - Crytography; then definitely you want to go deep in algebra, maybe get your feet wet with some computer science. There are definitely more options available than “major in math to teach math” - but most of that is going to require (as you know) a graduate degree of some sort.</p>
<p>There are math programs that don’t need too much theory.</p>
<p>Applied and Computational Math, Financial Math and Statistics are some.</p>
<p>If you are comfortable with math and computers the sky’s the limit. You can work literally anywhere, from coal mines to the top of skyscrapers, from petroleum exploration underwater to the highest levels of global finance.</p>
<p>You’ll eventually see that even in applied and computational mathematics, if you go deep far enough (i.e. graduate study), that theory is very important. It is, for example, impossible to understand applied PDEs well unless you have a strong command of analysis.</p>