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Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

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Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

#1

Post by gremble »

Granted, as I am only graduating with a straight BSc it is perhaps a bit presumptuous of me to consider myself a mathematician, but I would like to. I've been looking at jobs and the only people who seem interested in me are banks or people looking for a "quantitative analyst" in the financial sector.

Who hires mathematicians, other than the aforementioned financial industry?

I know that machine learning is pretty math heavy, and I have taken a look at some of the mathematics involved and some programming firms also don't mind if you have a BSc Mathematics/Applied Mathematics degree. But doing that doesn't seem like doing mathematics.

This is perhaps an odd question for the site, but I have been struggling with this and everyone here seems professional and helpful from my years of reading here.

Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

#7

Post by arcanus »

HPC companies hire many mathematicians. I work with several PhDs in applied mathematics.

Another area is finance, as you mentioned. I interviewed at several hedge funds and investment banks after my undergraduate degree (in physics and mathematics).

Of course, it's not hard to go into CS for a masters or PhD which opens up many other options as well. This was more what I did.

Almost all these positions require you to be capable of both whiteboard work, along with programming. So be sure you can develop software.

Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

#8

Post by ChrisRackauckas »

Machine 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 ...", where if you take a field and stick quantitative in front there's a subfield for it. If you search those terms you'll likely find things more in line with what you're looking for.

As for places to look, there's lots of stuff going on in the web and general computing sectors which are now making use of machine learning tools and hiring teams of data scientists. There's also quantitative biology (pharmacology), climate science, etc. disciplines, but many of them want applicants who have a PhD.

If things don't seem "mathy" enough, it's because a lot of the true math jobs and research requires a graduate degree in a math-related field. Doesn't need to be a Math/Applied Math PhD, but even CS, Physics, Climatology, Systems Biology, etc. programs set you up for a math-based career. Without trying to be demeaning, math is a very vertical discipline and the issue is that undergraduate math is really just the basic competences and most of the interesting stuff comes after, which is why many things require a lot more than a BS.

Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

#9

Post by lmkg »

I graduated with a BSc in Mathematics in 2008, and didn't exactly know what I wanted to do. I just typed the keyword "analyst" into job search engines. It worked pretty well! I ended up getting a job in a field that I didn't even know existed when I started (web analytics). It turns out that almost every industry has some sort of data that they can benefit from having someone analyze it, and a Math degree is a pretty good qualification for it.

Don't worry too much if you don't match the exact description of a job posting. I've actually never met all of the job requirements for any of the jobs I've been hired to. Point of fact, most people will look at a Math degree as a degree in "Very Smart" and give you the benefit of the doubt about being able to pick up any specific skills you might be missing. This is doubly-true for niche fields (like web analytics) where there aren't specialized degrees, and picking up the skills on the fly is a requirement.

I will say, almost any job that you take won't look like "doing mathematics" in the sense that you're used to from college. That pretty much doesn't exist outside of academia, with the possible exception of research labs that require an advanced degree.

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