What can I do with a math major? Acknowledgements: Jonathan Adler PIC Math – Brigham Young University

“‘mathematician’ returned zero results” When searching for my first job, there were zero jobs labelled “mathematician” Lots of jobs would take math majors “If they’re hiring math majors, that must mean I’ll be doing math! Let’s see how it goes!” “‘mathematician’ returned zero results”

Vistaprint Vistaprint sells custom printed business cards online Job description: maintain the statistical models used to forecast the business What that meant… Vistaprint Press the button in SAS once a month that spits out the forecast. Paste the results into excel and make charts Paste the charts into Powerpoint.

Lesson: Difference between “Math” and “mathy” Proving theorems Developing new methods Finding new applications for existing methods Using existing methods in conventional ways Manipulating data in interesting ways Manipulating data in Excel Manipulating charts in PowerPoint Pressing the button that needs to be pressed Going to meetings Every math undergrad thinks they will end up here “Math” work Interesting jobs for math grad students fall here Interesting jobs for math undergrads fall here “mathy” work Vistaprint job most jobs for math undergrads fall here Office work

Lesson: Difference between “Math” and “mathy” Job titles Lesson: Difference between “Math” and “mathy” Proving theorems Developing new methods Finding new applications for existing methods Using existing methods in conventional ways Manipulating data in interesting ways Manipulating data in Excel Manipulating charts in PowerPoint Pressing the button that needs to be pressed Going to meetings Researcher “Math” work Scientist Machine learning expert/ Data scientist/ Statistician/ Operations researcher “mathy” work Analytics Analyst Office work Associate

Lesson: Difference between “Math” and “mathy” Nothing “wrong” with being lower on the ladder Just because it isn’t “Math” doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting and a good brain workout Way more jobs lower on the ladder Too high up and your stuff doesn’t get used You can move up the ladder Find a new area to do something mathematical Improve a current process with clever tricks Automate a process that is boring Lesson: Difference between “Math” and “mathy”

Problem: Vistaprint had data on revenue for every order for the past few years On a recent Tuesday had a bug which went undetected and lowered sales dramatically A director emailed my department and asked for history of sales over all Tuesdays, was going to take the average of that and if you’re below it you can tell there is a bug Options: Run a SQL query to get the data and email it to him Point out it’s a much more complicated and interesting problem Sales are increasing over time Only interested in sudden drops How do you correctly determine how low is “too low?” What if you want to detect it more quickly than that? Example

Lesson: Skills you should get before leaving school To be decent in industry you need to know Basic databases (intro database course) Everyone stores their data in SQL (or equivalent) Since industry mathematics is all based on data, you need to be able to manipulate it Basic programming (intro programming course) Don’t have to be a CS wizard, but do need to be able to understand loops, functions, and the simple stuff Language isn’t a big deal (ex: MATLAB is okay), but need to be able to do more than just run built in functions Basic statistics (intro statistics) Everything has uncertainty Need to be able to understand how the uncertainty of the data will affect your results Unfortunately assumptions from class never hold, so get really to roll with it Other knowledge will help (ex: linear programming) Lesson: Skills you should get before leaving school

Lesson: Skills you should get before leaving school To be excellent in industry you need Everything from the previous list The ability to learn more things Lesson: Skills you should get before leaving school

1. Given a sequence of numbers taken by sampling something at a constant interval, predict the next numbers in the sequence. 3 math problems I never saw in school but show up all the time in industry

2. Say you are running a major online store and a customer is currently using your website. Before they check out, you get the chance to show them one more product. Use math to figure out which product to show them. 3 math problems I never saw in school but show up all the time in industry

3. Given a set of data, partition it into related groups 3 math problems I never saw in school but show up all the time in industry Math Majors Standard Population