1. On finding good math jobs in Industry Dr. Jonathan D Adler jonathandadler@outlook.com

2. Questions during your undergrad What kind of jobs are actually out there for math students? What jobs are actually enjoyable? Do I want to teach? What should I be doing now to get me those jobs? What classes should I be taking? What extracurriculars are important? So what’s the deal with internships anyway? Should I get a Masters? A PhD? Can I take time off before going back to school? Will this actually help me if I don’t want to be a professor? Who should I be asking these questions to? 2

3. Allow me to answer your questions By telling you my life story 3

4. College: Worcester Polytechnic Institute 4

5. What kind of jobs are there for math students? I became a math major because I liked taking math classes When I was an undergraduate in math I had no idea what kinds of jobs I could get. I figured the breakdown was: 1.High school math teacher 2.College math professor 3.Industry??? Naturally, as someone who liked taking math classes, (2) seemed like the natural choice for me. Decided to get a BS/MS so that I could then get a PhD Maybe more useful for industry I guess? Did my master’s thesis on graph theory and monadic second order logic 5

6. Might as well test the waters. Had an internship at BBN technologies Used partial differential equations to model how waves propagate for sonar and other naval uses Made some cool MATLAB demos with waves propagating Had a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Tried for find exact solution for some time delay differential equations Sat around staring at a piece of paper hoping to simplify some really really tricky equations 6

7. Maybe being a professor wasn’t right for me If being a math professor means doing a lot of trying to find exact solutions and coming up fruitless, maybe it wasn’t right for me. My internship was fun! I solved problems, and wrote code people could use! Maybe industry would be right for me. I had a few more internships: Did a project with the BOSE Corporation numerically modeling screw insertion into plastic Worked at Boeing making mathematical forecasts of how aircraft demand would change in the near future It felt like math 7

8. Finished school, time to find a job When searching for my first job, there were zero non- teaching 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!” Ended up getting a job at a company called Vistaprint 8

9. Tip 1: “Tall oaks from little acorns grow” I was able to get a job because I had internships Employers want to know an employee can handle a work environment Fundamentally different than “A+ student” I was able to get internships because I had other internships I also talked to professors, friends, family, anyone Getting the first one is the hardest Doesn’t have to be an “internship” Class project experience Research with a professor Fun project (ex: kaggle.com) Particularly project based extracurriculars (ex: game development club) 9

10. First real job: Vistaprint 10

11. Vistaprint Vistaprint sells custom printed business cards online Referred by a friend (hiring math majors!) Job description: maintain the statistical models used to forecast the business What that meant… 11 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.

12. Tip 2: Difference between “Math” and “mathy” 12 “mathy” work “Math” work Office work 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 Interesting jobs for math undergrads fall here most jobs for math undergrads fall here Interesting jobs for math grad students fall here Vistaprint job (as hired)

13. Tip 2: Difference between “Math” and “mathy” 13 “mathy” work “Math” work Office work 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 Job titles Researcher Scientist Business analyst Analyst Analytics / Data Science Machine learning expert/ Senior data scientist/ Statistician/ Operations researcher/ Advanced analytics expert

14. Tip 2: 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 Thinking all the time is exhausting 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 14

15. Tip 2: Example 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: a)Run a SQL query to get the data and email it to him b)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? 15

16. Tip 2: Example (solution) I was loud and complained we were doing things the wrong way, and ultimately was put in charge of a team to create a system of statistical quality control tools to detect anomalies Normalize the data: By day of week By time of year By if it is a holiday Compare to recent few hours for sudden drops, previous week for more long term decay. Use mean and standard deviation to detect when an drop is sufficiently large 16

17. Tip 3: 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 course) 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) 17

18. Tip 4: Learn how to learn To be excellent in industry you need Everything from the previous list The ability to learn more things Projects and internships are potentially great ways to learn how to learn 18

19. Vistaprint (continued) By the time I left Vistaprint I was: Building new models for forecasting sales volumes using much more advanced methodologies If you have the previous three years of sales volumes, how can you predict what next year’s will be? By day? Leading a team to build a statistical quality control tool for sales metrics Dabbling in recommendation engine to decide what products to show to users of the site Given that you know a lot about the person visiting the site, how can you decide what products to recommend to them? 19

20. Next real job: Boeing 20

21. Boeing Boeing sells airplanes Worked in the market forecasting group: helped predict number of airplanes the world would need in 20 years Example problem: suppose you have historic data on when aircraft were built and when they were scrapped; how can you predict when airplanes that are currently flying will be scrapped? Answer is affected by things like economic downturns This is a statistical analysis, given you have an airplane and you know it’s model and age, what is the probability it will be scrapped in a particular year? Model and age are independent variables, predicting scrapped probability We used a logistic regression ultimately 21

22. Boeing While job had some math, ultimately I fell lower on the ladder “I know what will help get me higher up that ladder! More school!” Maybe I’ll realize I wanted to be a professor after all 22

23. Grad school 2: Arizona State University 23

24. Arizona State University Went to get a PhD in Industrial Engineering Liked the operations research part of math, but that wasn’t in the math department of ASU Conveniently also taught me statistics and data mining Researched routing policies for electric vehicles (graph theory meets optimization meets transportation) Being an academic is: An extremely difficult job to get in the first place Wasn’t ultimately rewarding to me Academia: publish papers that move the field forward slightly Industry: make models and tools that can help your one particular company a lot 24

25. Grad school and industry do mix! Many grad students worry that doing time in industry before a PhD will make them be a weaker candidate “departments won’t want to accept you” “you’ll get too used to the money” But it’s a great idea Teaches you how to work 40 hours a week Lets you understand why you’re choosing to be there You might like industry You will be less broke in grad school Industry teaches other skills Going from undergrad straight to a PhD can be really risky! If you don’t get a job in academia and you don’t have the lesson 3 skills and internships then it will be really hard to get a job in industry 25

26. Grad school and industry do mix! You can get internships during grad school! A nice income supplement for grad students An introduction to what industry is like A break from research to let you get a fresh perspective Essential if the student ends up going to industry Don’t be the professor who doesn’t let their student work during the summer 26

27. Current job: Promontory Growth and Innovation 27

28. Promontory Growth and Innovation We are “management consultants” in that we help companies increase profitability I am a lead on the team that takes client data and tries to figure out what’s going on End up using a grab bag of mathematical techniques Data mining Bayesian statistics Linear programming Graph theory Pretty high up the “mathy” ladder yet still get to deliver real value Over the past year I accidentally became a Software developer Project manager 28

29. Promontory Growth and Innovation (Example problem) A hospital has hourly staff, which work in different departments and jobs (sometimes multiple) The staff is taking a lot of overtime hours How much of that overtime is necessary? A matching problem: The departments and jobs have a demand that needs to be filled The staff has a supply There is a bipartite graph between those two sets, and the edges are if an employee can do that job A linear program can be solved to figure out how much of the demand can be served before needing overtime 29

30. Tip 5: grad school only sort of helps Graduate school can teach you how to learn on your own Essential for jobs higher up the mathy ladder Grad school may teach you some of the three key skills (statistics, databases, programming) An MS or PhD may open doors for some jobs higher up on the mathy ladder A doctorate without experience is an even harder hire Has a huge opportunity cost if you’re not careful 30

31. Questions during your undergrad (revisited) What kind of jobs are actually out there for math students? Teaching jobs – high school and small liberal arts professors Industry jobs – helping companies by using math on their data Research jobs – doing academic research to move the field forward What should I be doing now to get me those jobs? What classes should I be taking? Stats, programming, databases, and some focused math classes What extracurriculars are important? Anything that makes you well rounded, but especially project work So what’s the deal with internships anyway? Get experience in being in a work environment so future employers can trust you Should I get a Masters? A PhD? Maybe, if having thought provoking work is important to you Can I take time off before going back to school? Yes, and actually it’s great Will this actually help me if I don’t want to be a professor? If you’re smart about it Who should I be asking these questions to? People who have been down this road before. Ask your professors, they can put you in contact with former students and people in industry 31

32. Questions? 32