Department of Mathematics
§ Why Study Math?§
Why YOU Should Study Mathematics
Employers, professional programs, and graduate programs are looking
for people who have a core of transferable skills. These are
skills that prepare you for a job in nearly any industry or business
and allow you to adapt to new situations readily. Indeed, with
the fast pace of technological changes today, you will likely change
jobs several times in your life and eventually will likely find
yourself in industries that are not even imagined today.
On this webpage, we will explore:
- Transferable Skills (Your tool box for any job)
- Jobs for Math Majors (What do you do once you have your degree)
- What You Study (What will I actually study as a math major?)
Transferable Skills
All majors in the College of Liberal Arts focus on teaching students valuable transferable skills, but the mathematics skill set is unique. By its nature, the mathematics major teaches a skill set distinguished by its focus on technical material, rigor, reasoning, and communication. Such skills include:
- Critical thinking
- Logical reasoning
- Discipline
- Learning/Applying difficult and complex concepts
- Problem solving
- Generating solutions
- Data analysis
- Pattern recognition
- Identification of relevant and extraneous data
- Computational skills
- Understanding of algorithms and processes
Jobs for Mathematics Majors
Although a few mathematics majors will eventually have a job title of "mathematician," most of us have job titles that do not immediately reveal our mathematical background. Here is a short list of jobs that mathematical acquaintances of the Mercer mathematics faculty have done over the years. Some of these jobs require a graduate degree in mathematics or a specialized field and some do not.- Accountant
- Advertising consultant
- Actuary
- Bioinformatics specialist
- Business analyst / consultant
- Business manager
- Computer programmer
- Cryptanalyst or Cryptographer at the National Security Agency
- Engineer
- Financial advisor
- Financial mathematics analyst / Financial engineer
- High school teacher
- Lawyer
- Minister
- Officer in the U.S. Military
- Operations research
consultant
- Physician
- Professor
- Software developer
- Statistician
Other information about jobs in mathematics can be found at the following websites.
- Information on Math Jobs from Purdue University
- More
Information on Math Jobs from RIT
- Early Career Info from the American Mathematical Society
- Sloan Career Cornerstone Center
- Careers in Finance
- Careers in Business
- Statistics Career Opportunities
- How to be an Actuary
- Search for mathematics jobs in the Occupational Outlook Handbook from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Video on careers in mathematics from the Mathematical Sciences Research
Institute
What You Study
Now that you are interested in pursuing a mathematics major...what does that entail? What topics will you study? Clearly, calculus is a cornerstone of the curriculum but what else?The first courses in the curriculum focus on studying rates of change, slopes, and areas. There will be need to develop computational ability and geometric understanding. As you get further into the curriculum, the central theme is understanding mathematical objects, understanding relationships between such objects, and creating arguments to verify these relationships.
The curriculum for our mathematics major includes studying most of the following.
- rates of change & areas
- equations that describe rates of change & their solutions – very useful for modeling and applications
- solutions to linear systems of equations and the structure of the mathematical objects involved
- the mathematics involved in computer science
- probability
- theory & application of statistics
- methods and techniques of creating mathematical models and analyzing them
- the underlying theory of calculus; properties of various types of functions, sequences, series, etc.
- results that come when calculus is applied to functions that accept and produce complex numbers
- properties of and relationships between geometrical objects
- methods and techniques of proof writing and communicating mathematics
- the structure of various number systems and systems of mathematical objects