Just because you like math doesn’t mean you have to make math your career
What kinds of jobs do kids who love math get when they grow up?
What kinds of jobs do college math majors get when they graduate?
I majored in math in college. After college, many of my math major friends and classmates and I entered the real world and got jobs.
Several years later, one of our kids attended a math camp. Parents attended alongside their children at this camp, so there was a parent program. For many parents, it was their first experience with “math people.” Many parent program lectures focused on introducing math-related topics to parents with kids who loved math. While a few parents were math people with math kids, most of the parents had not been math people, so they were learning about this world for the first time.
Since I had been a math major and had gotten a job, the camp organizers asked me to give a talk about what kinds of jobs a math kid could eventually think about getting. Obviously, a math kid could become a math professor, teacher, or researcher. But what else was out there?
Statistical Data Helps, But Not Really
My presentation started with a few numbers to help set the tone.
In the USA, approximately 20,000 to 27,000 math majors graduate from college every year, based on the USA’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The data for the 1950s to 2020 can be found here (footnote).1
Then I shared data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and other websites.
All of this statistical data painted a picture of the number of “math-related” jobs that existed, as calculated by some USA government agencies.
Looking back now, I realize that these broad statistics are not very interesting because there’s no story there. There’s no one you can point to for your kid and say, “See, that person liked math and now they have a job doing X.”
So you can imagine my excitement when the other day, while browsing high school math camps, I came across a page where the math camp had links to people who had attended the math camp and what kind of job they had! Ah, if only I had known then what I know now. = )
The Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics
The Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics (HCSSiM) is a math camp in Amherst, Massachusetts. Here’s how it describes itself:
HCSSiM is an intensive six-week encounter with college-level mathematics for talented and highly motivated high school students. It is demanding and expanding. Participants spend a major portion of each day actively engaged in doing mathematics (not simply learning the results of mathematics). HCSSiM students live in the dorms at Hampshire College in Massachusetts for six summer weeks, and study and play in its fields, woods, and academic buildings (not typically in that order). Typically, there are as many girls and non-binary students as boys.
The daily schedule includes 4 hours of morning classes (Mon-Sat), the pre-supper Prime Time Theorem, and evening problem sessions. Afternoons are devoted to reading, rest, recreation, occasional trips to town, and informal study. Participants have unparalleled access to faculty members in classrooms, at meals, and in the program dorm. Productive collaborations continue long after the program, and many lifelong friendships are forged.
What caught my eye is that they have an “About Our Alumni” Page (found here → https://hcssim.org/about-our-alumni/)
The page has a section called “Some Not-So-Recent Alumni and What They’re Doing Now” with the description that “This list was generated more or less at random, and is disappointingly out-of-date.”
Out-of-date and random doesn’t mean much to us, though, because we’re looking for a good story we can share with our kids, and having a person you can point to and learn about makes for a much better story than a statistical data set.
HCSSiM Alumni (random and not a complete list)
You should visit the page and read through all the linked bios, but to save you time, here are a few snapshots of people who interested me.
The obvious alumni jobs:
Mathematics faculty (math)
Statistics Faculty (math and data)
Biostatistics and Epidemiology faculty (math and biology/medicine)
Computer science faculty (math and computers)
Physics/Astronomy faculty (math and nature)
Engineering faculty (math and machines)
Economics faculty members (math and human allocation of scarce resources)
Software (math and computers)
Finance (math and money)
Some unexpected high-profile alumni job:
History Professor: Jessica Riskin is a historian of science at Stanford University
Community Ecology: Aaron Ellison does research in community ecology at Harvard
High School Principal: P.J. Karafiol is the Principal at Lake View High School in Chicago, IL.
Beverage Company Founder: Barry Nalebuff founded Honest Tea
Dean of Arts and Sciences: David Manderscheid is Dean of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University
Neurobiologist: Sue Hannaford is a neurobiologist at the University of Puget Sound
Unexpected regular alumni jobs:
Lawyers or law faculty
Medical researchers and faculty
Book authors
and many more.
So all kinds of jobs where being able to think logically is helpful.
Just because you like math doesn’t mean you have to make math your career
The last part of the presentation at the camp was just the subtitle to this section. I wanted to make it clear, then and now in this newsletter, that just because your kid loves math doesn’t mean they have to make math their career.
Sure, if they love math as kids, it’ll be very easy for them to fall into a career where they do math as adults. However, just because they love math now doesn’t mean they can’t love other things as well or change what they love later.
That said, who knows what will happen between now and when your kid starts looking for a job, so enjoy your time with them now and explore new things!
That’s all for today :) For more Kids Who Love Math treats, check out our archives.
Stay Mathy!
All the best,
Sebastian Gutierrez