Suggestions for math major

Parents Forum
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<p>As a math professor, I would concur that stats would be less competitive, and more employable. For some reason, a lot of math professors dissuade students from statistics, claiming something like it’s not “real math” or some such thing. Impressionable students then have this bias stuck in their heads. I graduated from a top math PhD program in 1994 into a very bad academic job market. The few interviews I got were because of my specialty in Applied Mathematics. Currently, in my department, any future tenure track openings are slated for stats or actuarial science etc. We recently advertised for a temporary position late in the hiring season, and the majority of applicants were from a pure math background - meaning they still had no offers as late as April. Even small regional universities seem to want to hire in stats or other more applied subfields of math- they have enough of the pure math folks, and are looking for courses to offer which would be better suited for employment. As academia keeps downsizing, and replaces tenure track faculty with temp faculty or adjuncts, the prospects for math PhD’s are not encouraging - it’s looking more like the humanities PhD market.</p>

<p>Still, if grad school in pure math is an aim, an REU is a must . There are more opportunities for women for getting into a top tier grad school, but they will still be competing with the tippy top folks (former olympiad winners, Putnam exam winners etc.), especially in pure math.
The American Mathematical Society (ams.org) has many articles on grad school and employment data. The Association for Women in Math ( <a href=“http://www.awm-math.org”>www.awm-math.org</a> ) also has information for undergrads. </p>

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<p>@mathprof63‌ thanks for the info. Some of it is surprising to me

I guess that’s the emphasis colleges now have - more majors related specifically to job related fields.</p>

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<p>That’s depressing! I had friends long time ago who were statistician. Back then they couldn’t get a job.</p>

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<p>I found area of mathematics from Wikipedia useful
<a href=“Mathematics - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areas_of_mathematics&lt;/a&gt;
Pure math
<a href=“Pure mathematics - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>At my daughter’s college, Phd in Math was hired in to teach CSE</p>

<p><a href=“Zintin | Computer Science”>http://cse.ucsd.edu/node/2534&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Not that surprising for someone whose specialty in computer science is theoretical computer science (i.e. the mathematical foundations of computer science).</p>

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<p>Why is that a surprise? A majority of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the US are in overtly pre-professional majors. Even decades ago, many students in liberal arts majors chose them for pre-professional reasons (e.g. pre-meds studying biology, pre-laws studying political science, and students doing applied math or statistics for actuarial preparation).</p>

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<p>@ucb‌ I think he is more suitable to teach math than CSE because there is also math and CS minor under the math department. But there is a huge growth in CSE so he ends up teaching there.
I looked at his CV and his research topics, they are more math related than CS.
<a href=“http://math.stanford.edu/~dankane/cv.pdf”>http://math.stanford.edu/~dankane/cv.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>That’s a thought. My D could tweak her course load to veer off to CS if it doesn’t work out.</p>

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<p>She is at an REU this summer and I would think she will do it again next summer. Is an REU more for pure math track?</p>

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<h2>@Iglooo asked: She is at an REU this summer and I would think she will do it again next summer. Is an REU more for pure math track? </h2>

<p>No -there are REU’s focused on different topics, depending on the REU site. Here’s list from te NSF. They vary somewhat year to year depending on the funding:
<a href=“REU Sites | NSF - National Science Foundation”>REU Sites | NSF - National Science Foundation;

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On another note, the guy hired for CS at UCSD has multiple strengths. It is usually rare for a top research university like UCSD to hire a math person for CS - but in this case, he can cross over b/c theoretical computer science and math kind of blend at very high levels (as @ucbalumnus pointed out), and he is extraordinarily talented. That last part is the key. For an average Ph.D. mathematician, even from a top-tier institution, only a small/medium college that can’t find a CS Ph.D. will probably hire a math Ph.D. with some CS. Even the CS dept. in my regional university will not look at a Math Ph.D. to fill their CS positions, because they need someone with both a practical and theoretical CS background.</p>

<p>Many times, I have advised my math majors who like CS to double major in Math and CS or change their major to CS. </p>