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That's very nice, but can you do anything useful with it?

The most obvious place for a mathematician to find a job is Math-Jobs.com. There is one for academia and another for industry. They are simple and straight forward and are probably the first places to look. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

 

There are several directions I can take and here they are:

  • Get an academic position in a university

  • Get a job that requires math as applied to new technology

  • Work for the Federal government

  • Become a scientist

  • Use the American Mathematical Society to find employment

  • Insurance is a big application area of math

  • Work for a company that produces software by mathematicians for mathematicians

  • Become an accountant

  • Find temporary work until I land that great job

  • Go to the career center of my old school Claremont Graduate University

  • Work in Silicon Valley

  • Tutor to bring in extra money until I find something that is more permanent

  • There will always be Community Colleges and High Schools and they will never stop teaching math

  • Talk to math alumni of my old school Claremont Graduate University

  • Every journal article in math has the email address of the authors. Find a topic that interests me and email the author to find work. They would know.

I will talk about each of these in the order mentioned above:

 

Get an academic position in a university

There are 4 websites devoted to just this:

ChronicleVitae

HigherEdJobs

VersatilePhD

Caltech

The Chronicle of Higher Education is an old time-honored publication that traditionally was the place where openings for new faculty positions were advertised. When the internet became available this newspaper went online and it has a website devoted to jobs in academia.

 

Versatile PhD is a web site which targets PhD's. It has a jobs section but there is more. People can network with other PhDs and get news.

 

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is a prestigious university here in Pasadena which specializes in students of science. Their website contains a jobs section and this is where I might get work as a technician in a Caltech lab working under a professor. I think they would appreciate having a trained mathematician who is at home in an academic setting.

 

Math Jobs in Technology

There are 4 websites devoted to this:

Dice

Monster

CreativeHeads

SanJoseJobing

Dice, Monster and Creative Heads are websites that specialize in Tech jobs. They are not necessarily looking for mathematicians but all advanced technology is inconceivable without solutions to math problems arising in the field.

​

SanJoseJobing is (not surprisingly) a website devoted to jobs in San Jose which is a hotbed of technological activity.

 

I took the time to list the biggest companies in Silicon Valley

  • Adobe Systems

  • Apple, Inc

  • Google

  • Hewlett-Packard Enterprise

  • Intel

  • National Semiconductor

  • Oracle Corporation

  • Symantec

  • Cisco Systems

  • Microsoft

  • Qualcomm

  • Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

  • Brocade Communication Systems

  • Juniper Networks

  • LSI Logic

  • Nvidia

 

USA Jobs is a website exclusively devoted to jobs in the Federal government.

Nature Jobs is website for those seeking jobs as a scientist. Nature is a huge publisher of scientific popular magazines as well as scholarly journals including my favorite magazine of all time Scientific American. They produce hundreds of science publications.

 

The American Mathematical Society has its own website for mathematicians seeking employment

 

DW Simpson is for actuaries. An actuary is an expert in both math and insurance and how they work together. There are a series of exams that one must pass to become an actuary and one must necessarily start young. But there is still hope for me to work in insurance if I pass 1 or 2 of the beginning exams. This is a narrow option at best, but it might open up work for me.

 

Wolfram Research and Mathworks are the 2 leading math software companies. They produce software by mathematicians for mathematicians. Their products are very different and they complement one another and the companies do much mathematical work beyond just their software products. I probably wouldn't dream of working for either of them unless I had a PhD, but as things are, I think I would thrive in their working environments. My PhD thesis involved extensive Matlab programming which is Mathworks' flagship product.

 

Accounting Job Insider is a website for accounting jobs.

KellyServices and Net-Temps is for temporary employment. As I said before, this could tide me over until I settle into a more permanent career.

 

Fogster is a website that links to these 4 online news sources for what is going on in Silicon Valley:

  • Palo Alto Weekly

  • Menlo Park Almanac

  • Mountain View Voice

  • Pleasanton Weekly

Making the time to read these will keep me informed about the inside goings on of Silicon Valley and the technology business. Jobs in Silicon Valley command very high salaries. I am a rarity since there are tall barriers to entry in the math business.

 

Here is a list of colleges that are easily accessible to me via public transportation

  • L. A. Trade Tech College

  • Santa Monica College

  • USC

  • CSU Long Beach

  • UCLA

  • Pasadena City College

  • Cal State LA

  • Azusa Pacific University

  • Citrus College

  • Valley College

  • Pierce College

  • CSUN

  • L. A. City College

I plan on visiting human resources, talking to the Chair and leaving my resume to as many as time allows - hopefully all of them. I only need to get the Chair to load my website and then he will be hooked. On my website are many unpublished papers displaying my mathematical work.

 

The key to finding jobs in the 21st century amounts to having good keywords to search the many job postings. I have compiled a small list of the best ones for math:

  • Statistical

  • Financial

  • Data Analyst

  • Modeling

  • Numerical

  • Quantitative

 

That is the long story.  You see that I did a lot of research over the last 6 months and these are the fruits of my labor. I can't do all of these things, to be sure, but I have a broad view of the many options that are out there and I plan to fill each day with a small cross-section of this massive space of opportunities.

 

This is a partial answer to the question, "What can you do with a math degree anyway?"

Know an aspiring mathematician? Give him or her a link to this page!

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