Totally anecdotally, I've had friends with undergraduate degrees in Math go straight into consulting and software engineering out of college with limited work experience.
Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?
31–40 of 152 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?
#32Machine learning is actually quite math-lite in comparison to "math" like PhD math. Most masters/PhD math stuff just isn't required or used in the discipline at all. You can get away with undergraduate analysis for pretty much all of it. But it builds off of undergraduate math. So in that sense, you're not really looking for a position for "mathematicans", rather a position for "data scientist" or "quantitative ...",…
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Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?
#33I worked at a company that made CAD/CAM software and had to make extensive use of calculus / linear algebra / computational geometry. Depending on what kind of math you like doing / using, that might be an industry worth looking into. Though it was a software development job, so I'm not sure if that aligns with your interests either.
Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?
#34If you find out, let me know! One thing I'll caution you about is there's sometimes a bit of a disconnect between "doing math" as perceived by someone who studied e.g. CS versus someone who studied math. For some people, doing math means maybe doing some trigonometry or some basic stats; whereas others won't be satisfied unless they're working on algebraic k-theory or something similarly next level. For people in the former category, there are certainly jobs available with just a bachelors degree and ideally some programming skills, whereas for the latter, you'll almost certainly want a PhD (and even then you may not get to use that knowledge outside of academia, depending on your area of study.) You'll want to find out where you are on that spectrum, and how you feel about grad school / work life balance / etc.
Personally, I got a bachelors in math and ended up working as a software developer. There's enough overlap in the sort of thinking required that makes it reasonably enjoyable. I do wish I had more opportunities to use math in my job though!
Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?
#35banks, small armies of them...
Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?
#36Aranz Geo/ Seequent does providing you can code to
Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?
#37A math degree could be very useful in the remote sensing industry (this has both commercial and military uses). Processing radar and lidar data, construction of 3d representations from imagery and video sources. This has applications in agriculture, mining, medical, intelligence gathering, military intelligence, etc.
In my experiences with companies doing this work it was a healthy mix of CS, math, and physics personnel. The ones working for DoD largely preferred people with PhDs and masters degrees as they bill the government more for those people's time, but they would also provide a lot of financial aid (often 100%) for you to pursue graduate degrees for the same reason.
Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?
#38From my experience, I would offer the generalization that nobody hires mathematicians. Mathematics in society is more of a skill set than a professional title. The most challenging or cutting edge math that could be commonly used is the LINEST() function in Excel. A person who is good at math also has a lot of great skills to offer a company, it is just selling those features and not the calculus. I started out as a…
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Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?
#39I graduated with an MS in Applied Mathematics and ended up working as a data scientist for 4 years until moving on to more interesting stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?
#40If you find out, let me know! One thing I'll caution you about is there's sometimes a bit of a disconnect between "doing math" as perceived by someone who studied e.g. CS versus someone who studied math. For some people, doing math means maybe doing some trigonometry or some basic stats; whereas others won't be satisfied unless they're working on algebraic k-theory or something similarly next level. For people in the…
> disconnect between "doing math" as perceived by someone who studied e.g. CS versus someone who studied math
In what sense? There are folks studying theory in CS departments who are by all intents and purposes 'pure' mathematicians.