I simply do not see engineers as more creative than mathematicians. Thinking outside the box is a skill advanced mathematics requires. Math skills are an advantage in the world of computer software- it is so much more than writing programs. It will be interesting to see if your son ends up in a business- very different than my son’s interests. I knew a woman who majored in math and did her degree in 3 years then medical school eons ago. We chemistry majors figured she had it easy for hours/credit. Physicians come from many backgrounds, majoring in something you have a passion for first is best. But one also needs a passion for medicine, most math people do not.
Remember that college is for an education. This includes exposure to so much that wasn’t available in HS. Having that BA/BS (either one) will help for his future and if he likes his school he should stay unless his interests are best served elsewhere. Sounds like he is in good shape if he can ignore mom. Painful for a parent but healthy.
My math major is a software engineer in SV. He majored in math instead of CS because he felt the math was better prep for the kinds of theoretical/big data/algorithm CS he wanted to do.
S’s experience in looking at math/CS programs is that most BS degrees require a certain number of other science courses. S was taking graduate CS courses his freshman year of HS, so to him, using the math major as a way to develop his tool belt made more sense. We know a lot of folks who were math majors at UMD-CP who picked up the second CS major, esp if they had lots of AP/placement credit. The courses cross-pollinated, counted as allied science for each other and with UMD’s generous placement credit, it could be done in four years. At Chicago, to double major, he would have had to take seven allied courses for each major. No cross-pollination. He took his allied classes in CS, which covered the theoretical stuff he wanted and didn’t have to spend a lot of time on the engineering/hardware side. Win-win.
I worry that down the road, not having a CS degree will confuse the job robots and keep him out of positions; he’s is adamant that it’s not an issue. Since he is self-supporting and makes more than we do, I smile and nod. (But as long as he’s in SV, why not get the MS in CS at Stanford and punch the ticket. Classes are right near his office!)
My eldest kid, who never did any CS in high school, was able to do enough CS, both in class and self-teaching/learning, to use his MIT math degree to become a data scientist. He is now considering the possibility of a PhD in stats or machine learning. He and his wife don’t want to live in SV (they’re currently working in AZ), but they do miss the East Coast. We’ll see where they eventually end up.
And yeah, he’s been there less than a year and has gotten two raises already, and their combined household income is more than we earn in 2 1/2-3 years. Glad they are doing better than we are!
I know two math majors. One went to Bowdoin and will start a graduate program at the U of Minnesota this fall. Another went to Wellesley and is now working for Google.
My daughter has always liked math, but was not an A student in math. Not knowing if she might “hit the wall” when she got to upper level theoretical math, she majored in both business (Econ and Finance) and mathematics. She got much better grades in her Econ and Finance majors, but got through the math with a respectable GPA in the major. She did the “applied math” track, as her interest was not in theory. She got a masters in Statistics and is working as a cost analyst in the defense industry. She had courses in data mining and could have found work in that area, or in banking or finance. A lot of employers value quantitative skills, and successfuly completing a math major demonstrates that one has them.
I was a math major, and have ended up doing well in life. It did take me a while to figure out how math was going to be useful, but this might be largely because it can be useful in so many different areas.
I would suggest your son take a close look at Operations Research (which to me is a real cool and useful application of mathematics). Also, he should take some computer science. Finally, don’t worry, there are lots of ways to use a degree in mathematics, and I strongly suspect that he will figure something out.
IMHO, math is way more useful in more ways than a bachelor’s degree in physics.
I switched from physics to political science back in the day. Lots of social sciences use a lot of math these days. But straight math is lots and lots of theory–does he enjoy proofs??
BTW, I work now as a physician. Major does not determine career for many adults.
My father was a math major in college who became a securities lawyer. I never knew he majored in math until he was in his late 70s – I guess I had always assumed he had majored in government or something like that. I never saw him use more than basic math skills.
Two young cousins (now in their 30s). One was a college math major, and is now a postdoc in psycholinguistics. She has a tenure-track faculty position in a large university psychology department starting next spring. The other was an undergraduate physics major who got a PhD in applied math. He makes ridiculous amounts of money designing and running sophisticated options-trading algorithms. He never thought for a minute he would work in finance. He was completely ignorant of the whole industry until he started looking for a job shortly before getting the PhD.
I consider that pretty basic math skills. I do that, too, and I never took a math course after high school.
People actually consider me a fairly math-y person. I am very comfortable with numbers and with logical formulae. If for some reason I can’t remember something like the formula for the present value of an annuity, I can pretty easily reconstruct it. But I learned how to do that in 7th grade. I have never, ever used math in real life that I hadn’t learned by the end of 8th grade. (Roughly, Algebra I and Geometry I.)
Looks like you were good enough in math to be two grade levels ahead of the norm (and may have completed more advanced math in high school than many college students complete in college), and you retained what you learned about logic and such in geometry. But you may not be representative of the general population, including those who go on to law school.
DH was an accounting/CS major who worked for a few years and then went on to law school. Makes a huge difference when one is numerate and can apply systems analysis to various legal problems! (It also made the LSAT back then a breeze.)
Maybe I was two grade levels ahead of the norm, but all I ever did was take the classes my school offered. It was a very good, academically oriented private day school, but it didn’t have any class higher than AP Calculus, and there was essentially no culture at all of letting kids take that before 12th grade. When I was in 9th grade, I was taking Spanish and History with 11th and 12th graders, but I was just taking the normal smart-kid section of 9th grade math, which as I recall was indistinguishable from 8th grade math I thought it was really boring and stupid; I had no idea why anyone would be interested in math.
Which is to say: I am not surprised when people say that other cultures do a much better job of teaching math.