<p>I'm about three months away from graduating with a degree in Applied Mathematics & Statistics. I took a good dose of statistics, but I never want to touch actuary stuff. Operations Research is not my flavor either.</p>
<p>It seems like most of the math majors I've known end up going into software development jobs. Kind of funny, but I may end up doing that while in graduate school...I kind of have a job lined up doing SD. I don't like CS, though. I'm going to be "jumping ship" into a Mechanical Engineering masters.</p>
<p>I can code, it’s just not something I enjoy. I’m taking around three statistics classes next quarter to round my degree out after all the theoretical classes I took this year, which will never be used (although they were extremely interesting and I regret not being able to take topology). I looked at job listings tonight and it does look like a lot of employers are looking for master degrees, but the ones I tended to notice that were more entry level required more programming knowledge. </p>
<p>I don’t think I’d go down the statistics path since I’m already planning on entering an MS program for Mechanical Engineering, but I am still looking for full-time employment while I complete the program. I wanted to enter the mechanical track because I wanted to do research in computational fluid dynamics and get a degree that is more employable, I feel like. According to the math department website, it mentioned that everyone should be preparing for graduate study in engineering or some other physical discipline, which I thought was interesting since I doubt many applied math majors at my school want to continue on to graduate school. The “select” few I’ generally hang around with are all going to assume some type of engineering role through connections or pursue the graduate school opportunity in it. I wonder if it would be strange if I worked as a “data scientist” and then applied for engineering positions after I earned my masters. I’m not really sure if this constitutes a career switch as I never really had an interest in becoming a software developer or “data scientist”. </p>
<p>Ideally, I’d like to end up as an “engineering mathematician”. Someone from Siemens gave a talk here on rotor dynamics and described that title to me, which I thought was an awesome job and right up my alley. Not someone who codes all day.</p>
<p>I’m tutoring students with disabilities and I do not think I could cut it as a high school teacher since it requires a tremendous amount of patience to deal with teenagers. College students I could probably handle.I guess a software development job in the meantime if I had to take it would be an okay gig to hold me over for a while. I wish they’d give a lecture here basically that says “you either program or you’re useless” since any time I ask a pure math major here what they’re doing if they’re not teaching they have no idea and they don’t have any programming skills…</p>