<p>You do know that there are a lot…a lot…a LOT of things you can do with a math degree besides teach?</p>
<p>I would definitely recommend a math or stats major. In addition to some of the stuff mentioned, you could also go into finance/banking, operations research, market research analysis. EVERYONE is hiring statisticians these days - from big corporate businesses to government agencies to NGOs to nonprofts - to crunch their data. As a statistician or mathematician, you could work at a tech firm like Google or Apple; you could work for a hospital crunching numbers about infection control; you could work for a university medical center helping do biomedical research; you could help a business determine whether a new intervention increases productivity.</p>
<p>Actuaries consistently come in ranked s one of the top 5 jobs in terms of work environment, salary, and stress levels. Actuaries use mathematical and statistical models to predict risk; as such, they work for insurance companies to help set premiums, but also for businesses to estimate the amount of risk they have for various events. Actuaries earn a median salary of $87,000 a year. (I actually wanted to do this in high school, but a pair of teachers talked me out of it and I still resent their advice, lol.) Top actuaries can move into management and make a whole lot more.</p>
<p>Mathematicians make a median salary of $99,000 (median! That means half of them make more than that!) and economists earn a median of $89,000. Operations research analysts earn a median of about $70,000. The median for statisticians is $72,000.</p>
<p>If you like computers, bioinformatics is also a new field with lots of potential. There’s also software engineering, which is booming now. The median for software engineering is around $99,000.</p>