As a professor, I am quite familiar with the academic landscape. But when students come to me for advice on what kind of jobs (other than teaching high school) they can get with their BS degree in math, I have very little specific advice to give them. Actuarial work requires exams, and many of my students at my Directional U. are not of that caliber (around 3.0 GPA). My students are first gen to go to college, and work hard. They do not have close family/friend connections in the white collar working world to get that first opportunity. Despite faculty advice, they don’t plan too far ahead. I encourage students to be familiar with Excel and develop good writing skills, but unless they see it in a course, they are not likely to follow through on their own. Other faculty don’t seem to know much in this regard except to say “actuaries” or “grad school” or -cough, cough- “quant at hedge fund” . Sigh …
A while back @blossom suggested management trainee positions. I am thinking of telling my students about that.So that’s one avenue. Not many students know about such positions, and our career center is staffed poorly.
I am also thinking of suggesting they take some online courses that are workplace oriented like Coursera or Udacity.
I am really trying to discourage them from a MS degree program without any related job experience. Many students think that will open doors, but I do not think so - would like to hear from others about this. I know there are some parents here who are in HR or related fields.
Thank you for any advice you have.
Consider asking those with interest in computer science to add that to their course list earlier on. CS does look for mathematics majors. Look online at what the job lists are for top twenty math departments. The US government has jobs. Son did math, then added the CS major (instead of going to grad school) at UW-Madison. I remember looking at the math department website to see what math majors could do. They have around 100 undergrad degrees in math each year. Look at your state flagship math dept postings. Your grads who want to state close to home may find options there and recruiters who visit that school but not yours. There are jobs specifically for math majors out there.
Just search online indeed.com for math degree, and they will see a lot of jobs looking for math majors. One area which is booming is Big Data. Companies are recruiting math majors with some programming (python, R, java, Hadoop) and statistics background to do analytics on Big data. Most firms are willing to train because it is a fairly new area. Companies are utilizing data to help them with - product development, marketing, operation, security, etc.
This is just the kind of good advice that appears on this website. Someone posted a Boston Globe article recently that discussed how challenging it is to fill tech jobs in the Boston area and math was an area that some of these companies were looking for.
USAJobs.Gov. Acquisition program managers, management analysts, cost estimators…
@wis75 : thank you for your advice. If I see the students early enough in their college studies, I do suggest a double major in CS or Business.
We are not a flagship university and our degree programs in general are not as rigorous as the ones at state flagship. So only students near a 4.0 GPA from my university would even stand a chance of being competitive with those students. Also located in the NY-NJ metro area with many good universities. So the challenge is to find opportunities where our 3.0-3.6 GPA students have a decent chance for that first entry level job.
@oldfort : will ask my students to check out indeed.com well before graduation time, so that they can take appropriate electives while still in school.
I just want to say that you are to be commended for your proactive approach to your students. It’s easy to steer the tippy top students in a good direction; sometimes it can be hard to find the right path for kids just below that level. Just like the young HS student I mentored, first gen, Hispanic. Everyone says “there’s tons of scholarship money out there for you”. Not true when your SATs are below 500 even given a perfectly acceptable GPA.
@mathprof63 In addition to the good suggestions you’ve already received I would add that the demand for mathy employees is strong in lots of fields. One of those is journalism and communications. Look at online newspapers and blogs these days, as well as film credits. Students who can do visual design, perhaps with complex underlying math and/or applied statistics, not just art, will find some opportunities especially in online applications. For example, see this (out of date) posting: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/data-visualization-job-openings/. Also see this for interest of journalism schools in computational skills: http://computation-and-journalism.brown.columbia.edu/.
Thank you everyone, for your responses! They have all been useful!
Encourage them to do internships and part-time jobs during the school year, if your university is in a location that lends itself to that. Particularly in math/stats a lot of employers are looking to see that employees can apply their mathematical knowledge to real-world problems. The best way to demonstrate that is through actually doing that in jobs and internships. (Also, employers like to see evidence that their millennial employees can show up on time, function in an office setting, know office norms, etc. Having an internship - with a supervisor that can attest to that - will help).
One thing to do, OP, is to integrate some of that applied project work into your class if you can.
If you have a statistics department on campus, I would encourage them to take statistics classes (or at least take it if it’s offered in the math department). The recommendation to learn a programming language is also crucial, as most mathematical manipulation in the corporate world takes place in software programs.
Also, lots of mathematical professional societies publish information for students in math who are interested in careers that use math:
The Mathematical Association of America has a careers page (http://www.maa.org/careers) and they publish a book, 101 Careers in Mathematics and a brochure called “We Do Math!” (http://www.maa.org/careers/career-profiles/sales-marketing/we-do-math)
The math department at UC-Davis has a pretty decent list of careers that require math (https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~kouba/MathJobs.html)
WeUseMath.org is an aggregation of job profiles of careers that use math (http://weusemath.org/?page_id=800). There are some non-standard ones on there, like animator, air traffic controller, climatologist, market research analyst, and technical writer.
CoolMath.com has another list of resources for career development in math (http://www.coolmath.com/careers).