Careers in, and with, maths

September 2003

Careers in maths

Career paths that involve studying mathematics or a related subject and going on to work in a job where mathematics plays a substantial role.

Careers with maths

Many jobs need a good level of mathematical ability, and that even if a job can be done without this ability, you may well find your career significantly enhanced if you are mathematically literate.

Fear and loathing of maths

It's not possible to talk about maths without discussing the fact that many people hate it!

You must remember that many people you meet in your working life will feel like this.

Maths is, far more than other subject, built upon itself. If you didn't understand how to factorise an x² polynomial, then you will never understand how to find its roots.

Being interviewed by someone who doesn't like or understand maths

1. Recognise that there may be a negative perception of you from your CV - "clever" but "geeky" or nerdy". So present yourself as well-rounded.

2. Tell people what you have learnt from your studies. State the obvious! Key words - logic, reasoning, structure, rational, decision-making, analysis, data handling

3. Employers say what matters to them most is data-handling.

Lessons from interviewing people about their careers

Maths is easy!

Most people I have interviewed used expressions like "path of least resistance" or said "I always found maths easiest".

This sounds terrible! It sounds lazy and/or weird.

Say you were good at it, found it interesting, appreciated what it could enable you to do, looked into it and liked the options it opened up.

At the very least, say it was your best subject, not your easiest subject!

Maths is useless - or is it?!

Most interviewees had no real idea what sort of jobs a degree in a mathematical discipline might lead to. Again and again, they say "teacher or accountant". There is a mismatch between the actual career usefulness of mathematics, and the perceived career usefulness of mathematics. "Whatever you do further on in your life, call yourself a mathematician". Very few people have the job description "mathematician". "Mathematicians" tend to get called things like "defence analyst" or "actuary".

Careers in maths

defence analyst
medical statistician
computer software developer
statistical consultant
mathematical books editor
aerodynamicist
systems administrator
actuary
avalanche researcher
secondary maths teacher
sales forecaster
financial modeller
university researcher
computer games developer
electronic engineer
meteorologist
accountant
university lecturer

Themes:

Computing element - in fact, some of them are jobs that didn't exist pre-computer. Eg computer games developer, systems administrator.
Number-crunching. Eg medical statistician.
Providing a "maths consulting" role. Eg aerodynamicist, avalanche researcher.
Involve research, harnessed to a business/commercial purpose - eg financial modeller, meteorologist.

In more detail:

Computers. They provide you with a way to implement things that couldn't practically be implemented pre-computer. Often, these are mathematical algorithms.
Number-crunching. There is a famous saying "garbage in, garbage out" - but there is another way to get garbage, and that is to do a faulty analysis of perfectly good data. People who understand the principles of experiment design and analysis are in the most enormous demand across all walks of life:
- local government - education and health
- medicine - drug development and regulation
- polling and market research
and much more
"Consulting". Another way to work in a particular field of interest, while still using your mathematical skills, is to provide a specifically mathematical (rather than statistical) element to something that has a number of facets.
A Formula One team consists of literally a couple of hundred people, of whom the drivers are only the most visible. This team includes specialists on materials and aerodynamics, who help design new cars.

Or, researchers on avalanches includes people who know about snow, about geography, about geology - but also people who understand fluid mechanics.

It allows you a degree of flexibility and variety that isn't often found in a job.
Research. Numbers of people doing innovative maths research outside and inside academia are broadly comparable. This means there is very wide range of interesting jobs - original, intellectually challenging, work.

Careers with maths

Architect
Primary teacher
Military air traffic controller
Science communicator (Science Museum)
Science administrator (NESTA)
Qualifications manager

Themes

Transferable mathematical skills Some of them have a particular professional qualification for which you don't need maths. But they assured me that the skills they learnt from maths have stood them in good stead in their working lives.
Working with scientists and mathematicians Others are working in a scientific or mathematical environment, in jobs where a maths or science degree is essential, but they are no longer doing maths. I fall into that category - there are also jobs in the Civil Service and local government, and the voluntary sector, working with scientists and educators to put together programmes.
Communicating technical ideas Many mathematicians and scientists are rather poor communicators. If you are good at expressing complex ideas clearly and succinctly, there are plenty of roles in all sorts of organisations, for people who can "translate" technical ideas for the rest of us!

What is special about a mathematical career?

Flexibility

People have very heavily mathematical jobs in all sorts of fields of endeavour - and these jobs are not flagged up as being specifically mathematical. Although this is a problem for maths, in that people perceive it as not leading to many good jobs, it is actually linked to a great strength of the discipline, and that is its flexibility.

"Keep your options open"

Suppose you realise that don't actually want to do what you always thought you wanted to do. If your studies were very specific, this can be a total disaster.

But the beauty of maths is that it isn't just one subject. A lot of the people I have interviewed have said that along the way they switched their degree focus - and this is the crucial part - without having to repeat a year.

But still be focused!

What if you were focused - and then you discover that your focus was on the wrong thing? It's important to be able to rescue the situation.

Some of the people I have interviewed did have to change their degree course, but were given a lot of credit for the maths they had done because it was so much more relevant to their new subject than many other subjects would be to a different subject.

A real career story is all of these things

Hardly anyone matches the one-paragraph "profiles" of jobs that you can find.

Once a reporter asked Prime Minister Harold Wilson what he feared most, and replied "events, dear boy, events"!

People can - wrongly - feel like freaks if they don't know what they want to do, or feel that they might make the wrong choices. The reality is that most people feel like this a lot of the time, many people have more than one career, and many people make false starts before finding their feet. But often these parts of people's career stories are written out - doing other people a disfavour.

How to have a happy and successful working life

Always keep learning.
You never know which skills may come in useful in your next job, or what will be necessary to know in your current job if things - like the economy - change.
Always take the chance to do courses, or to learn new skills.
Be competent!
It's a competitive world, but competence and professionalism are at a premium in every field.
"Mere competence will put you in the top 10 percent. If you're audible, your writing is legible, and you don't talk too fast, you will be better than most".
- Spell-check your CV and covering letter, and ask a friend or relative to look through it
- Turn up on time
- Be polite and to the point. Don't be rambling or monosyllabic.
- Do your "homework" about the company and job beforehand - the web is a good place to get the information you need.
- Think about things from your employer's point of view. Too often, people think of what an employer can offer them, and not the other way round.
Think of yourself as a marketable commodity.
Make an periodic audit of your skills, and be hard-headed.
Make changes a step at a time.
If you know you're not where you want to be, see if you can plot a "stepwise" path to where you want to be, rather than having to come out and retrain.
It is often much easier to move within organisations - sometimes vacancies are only advertised internally, other times people may be willing to give you a chance because they know and trust you and think you're competent, whereas your CV wouldn't even get you an interview.
Show initiative.
If you don't match the person spec for a job you want, see if you can rewrite your life experiences, or pick up some voluntary or temporary skills, to make you a closer match.
Keep asking questions.
Find out what other people do, what the ups and downs of it are, how they got into it, where it's leading them, what tips they can give you, and so on.
Rewrite your CV and covering letter for every job.
It really shows when you don't.
Employers who advertise a job have a person in mind, and if they're any good they will have put together a list of competencies and used that to draw up a person spec. It is up to you to read the job ad and explicitly answer in your CV and covering letter all the questions in an employer's mind as they read your application.

Use your covering letter to tell the story of why you are the person for this job.
Talk to someone who has to appoint people.
Ask them for their pet hates, and what impresses them.
Be enthusiastic
It is the most visible, infectious, emotion. If you don't feel enthusiastic about the jobs you are applying for, you are probably applying for the wrong ones.
Don't settle for second-best
It's worth dreaming. But...
Be pragmatic.
I wish I'd been a bit more pragmatic along the way - I'd be earning a lot more now!
Be flexible.
Think of yourself as a work in progress, always try to keep options open without losing focus, plan for various eventualities.
Our parents are right in the value they place on qualifications!
Know your strengths and weaknesses and play to them.
Watch a video of a mock interview. Look back critically on situations where you did well and did badly.
Work out what really matters to you and make sure you don't compromise on that.
Guard against jealousy and disgruntlement.
If you are constantly moaning, either change jobs or stop moaning.
Take job descriptions and other people's stories of their wonderful lives with a pinch of salt.
It's hard to have confidence in your own jdugment and choices, but in the end it's the surest route to being happy.