High Paying Jobs in Math and Science? 383
An anonymous reader asks: "Where are the high paying jobs for those who are good in math and science? I've heard about math and science shortages for almost two decades now, and I was wondering what high salary/high demand jobs have resulted from these shortages. Most science majors I know actually make less than teachers (in Texas teachers make $38-40K to start for nine months of work). In terms of money, what career would you pursue coming out of college right now with a math or science degree?"
For math... (Score:5, Insightful)
Only a shortage for the brilliant (Score:4, Insightful)
Teachers (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, there are some crappy teachers out there that give them a bad reputation, but you can say that about any profession.
President of the World Bank (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The one you like (Score:3, Insightful)
It's virtually guaranteed [strappedthebook.com] that the first type of jobs do not exist, and the second type are the only jobs open to people under the age of 37. Even if you earn $160,000/year, to earn that much you're going to have to live in a place that costs you $100,000/year for a studio apartment.
Re:The one you like (Score:3, Insightful)
And besides, what some people consider boring, can turn out to be something you love. I love designing/creating databases, it seems boring as heck to some people, but to me its actually fun. So let the guy find something he might get paid well for AND enjoy doing.
Why pay for science and math??? (Score:2, Insightful)
My fellow physics graduates that wanted to stay in physics wanted to do research. First, the physics that man understands is far beyond what we have been able to utilize, so we don't necessarily need new ground breaking research as much as uses for what we already know. Second, what you do eventually has to be monetized. If your employer can't make money off you, he doesn't need you.
Lastly, define "high paying". The average income in the U.S. is somewhere in the $35,000 range. Then there are the financial wizards, namely CEOs and money managers. All of the top 100 hedge fund managers/ traders made at least $150 million last year, with the top 5 or so making around $800,000,000 (traderdaily.com for info). Basically, if you think making $60,000 or $80,000 or even $100,000 is a lot of money, you aren't even close to getting rich. If you want to be a scientist, you have to want to do the science regardless of the pay. That wasn't me.
If they won't pay your salary... (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the test: can you go out and form your own company and make more than you are being offered? If you cannot, then you've just discovered why somebody else doesn't want to hire you for that kind of money. Stop thinking about it as how much you are "worth" because of your educational expenditures, and start looking at the income you can reliably, continuously produce for your company. Once you have that number, divide it by three* and that's what your salary should be.
*okay, maybe two in a really large organization with low overhead, or if you fall at the very low or high ends of the payscale. But you're unlikely to be in either of the high/low paid cases.
Re:The one you like (Score:3, Insightful)
$30K a year is not bad for a single guy in his twenties. The problem is that many scientists are still making $30-$40K a year (e.g. as post-docs) in their 30's and 40's. It's hard to support a family on $30K a year - particularly if you're also hoping to save up enough to buy a house, pay for your kid's college and have enough left over for your own retirement.
In fact, let's do the math. Suppose you want to retire at age 65 and die at age 85 while living on a (rather meager) income of $30K a year. That's 20 years at $30K a year or $600K. Let's say you have two kids who go to a good, but not great, college (e.g. pray your kids aren't smart enough to get accepted to Harvard or MIT). That'll run you another $50K each for a total of $100K. Now, let's say you live in an average area. A decent house in a decent neighborhood will run you $300K. That's a million dollars total that you've got to earn in addition to putting food on the table (and paying medical bills and car bills and clothes, etc).
Let's say you get your undergrad degree by age 22 and you get your PhD by age 28 and you've got your student loans paid off by age 30. You now have 35 years to earn a million dollars in addition to "putting food on the table" for your family. That's $30K a year you need to be earning in addition to your day to day living expenses. Well, it's kind of hard to do that when your salary throughout your 30's and 40's is only $30K a year.
Sure, science pays better than being a checkout clerk at Walmart but it's pretty hard to justify all that extra effort and education when medical school or law school would have you earning ten times as much ($300k a year versus $30K a year).
I could not disagree more (Score:5, Insightful)
If *everyone* would learn to adjust their expectations about what constitutes a minimal acceptable standard of living so that they can live without debt within or - gasp - below their means - our culture would be wealthier, stronger, and better equipped to face challenges.
My next door neighbors are first generation immigrants from El Salvador. They have a three bedroom house which the two parents, three kids, his dad, her mom, share the house with two renters who live in the basement. 9 people in a 1700 square foot house! This is in one of the wealthiest counties in the States. The mom and dad have two jobs. The grandmother has a job, and the dad has occasional work on a third job. These are people who have little education and very poor English skills. They are thrilled to have the opportunity to live in this country, and they are making it happen. It's tough going, but a better deal than in Central America, and they consider it a privilege to have American citizenship. Perhaps we should, too.
Most of these college kids could live at home, have a part time job, enroll in community college for core credits, before transferring to a 4 year college, drastically cutting their tuition. They could refuse to allow themselves to spend more on their credit card than they can pay in a given month. They could live off-campus with several roommates to minimize housing costs. They could forego cable, cell phones and cars to reduce their expenses until their income increases.
Instead, our culture of consumption tells people that they should "buy it now." People actually think that they cannot expect to pay off a car or a house within their lifetime. Ridiculous!
We're generally narcissistic and convinced that stuff, power, or sex will satisfy us. This leads to frustration, deeper debt, and hopelessness.
It's not that life is hard and these kids are victims! It's that mostly they think that they have to obtain a standard of living that is higher than their income, and they become indentured servants at 20%/year interest.
Re:The one you like (Score:3, Insightful)
And if that's all that you were spending, that would be fine. But there's also the usury on those student loans (most people don't know this- but the banks can change the interest rate *after* the contract has been signed, unless it's explicitly in the contract not to- after a couple of deferments those student loans could easily exceed 20% APR), and to service the debt on the student loans, you need consumer debt when the car breaks down, etc. Also, $50 to 60K isn't a good enough salary to pay off the student debt anymore- you need $75-100k for that. At which point instead of Austin, you're looking at Manhattan.
There's good reason why Generation X and the Millenial Generation is now being called Generation Debt- on average we're spending 108% of our income just to survive.
Re:Nine months... what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most teachers, esp. those whohave never done anything else, don't realize that most salaried workers work more than 40 hours for their paychecks, and often see about 15-20 days of total leave.
Most non-teachers don't understand that for most of the day, a teacher is "on" and teaching requires more "quality" work time during those 4.5-6 hours than your typical cube drone in the same span of time.
Me? I don't work for the Man, I am the Man. When I don't come in to work, I don't get paid. If I take vacation, I don't get paid. If I don't do my job completely, I don't get paid. I don't get health insurance, retirement benefits, disability, or any other perk unless I pay for it. I have to pay for my annual training twice - once for the training, and again in the time that I'm not able to bill clients. I work about 50 hours a week (plus
Teachers actually get paid similarly what someone in industry with similar "ability" would get paid, on an annual basis, but they do have a lot more free time. If they choose to spend that free time on their classes and their career, that's their choice for the most part. Every discipline has people who like what they do, and part of that time is rightfully considered "hobby", not paid service. The trick is finding that person to work for you, or be your teacher, or provide you with their service.
Re:Teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
Show me a teacher who only puts in the hours 8-4, and I'll show you a teacher that the administration feels "isn't putting in the effort", and "is only doing the minimum needed to get by".
And the thing is, they're right. 8-4 is just the time they are required to be AT SCHOOL, in the room. Any teacher worth their salt spends plenty of extra time making sure that their lessons are prepared for the next day (or week) and that they are generally ready for anything the class can throw at them. Teaching doesn't just "happen"; it requires a tremendous amount of prep and organizational work.
Also, the vacation is lengthy, but fairly inflexible. Hope you don't want to take any time off OTHER than what the district says, or you've got some problems. Want to take a month off in March instead? Too bad! It's definitely a trade off.
Don't get me wrong, the vacation time is nice, but it has its flip side, and if you think it's a 40 hour a week job, you're deluding yourself. (Or talking about the crappy teachers who DO deserve the low end.)
Which brings us to...
"but why should experienced teachers get more money than the new teachers. They are doing the same job"
Erm.
EXCUSE ME?
Let me turn it around, and see if I can point out just a little bit of hubris on your part. Why should an experienced software developer get more money than a new one? They're doing the same job? Why should an experienced ANYONE get more money?
Answer: Because they do it better. Because years of experience mean that they will generally be more efficient at whatever the job is, do it better, with fewer errors, and have more bandwith to deal with more things. They will also have the experience to deal with the stranger situations that pop up, and will generally require less supervision and be more valuable employees. If you somehow think that this doesn't apply to teachers just as much as it applies to anyone else, then you have a very distorted view of teaching.
Re:The one you like (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If they won't pay your salary... (Score:1, Insightful)
Along those lines, I'm a post-doc in bioinformatics so I could work from home with my own computer. I get paid $40K a year plus some rather meager benefits. The thing is, by the time you throw in the "overhead" and such that is charged by the organization that I work at, the actual cost to the government is closer to $100K a year. So could I form my own company, cut out the organization I work at, and get paid $100K a year directly? Probably not. That's not how the system works. But it does raise an interesting question about how you calculate the value of scientific research.
More broadly, since the original question was about science, how do you calculate the value of science? It's not like you can open up a science "restaurant" where you charge each customer $5-$10 for a bit of science. The free market works well for certain consumables but how do you place value on a scientific discovery? Sure, you can give the first person to make a particular discovery a monopoly on that discovery but what if someone else would have made the same discovery a few days later? Can you really justify giving the monopoly exclusively to the first person? For that matter, once someone makes a discovery, how are you even going to know whether or not someone else would have made the same discovery at a later time.
I'll admit that the free market works great for a lot of things but I have yet to see a free market scheme that really works for scientific discovery.
Re:Nine months... what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you seriously concluding that if a teacher isn't in the schoolhouse then they're not doing any work?
You have absolutely no idea of the extra work public school teachers go through. My mother has taught public school for the past 20 years, and she has ALWAYS brought work home with her to do. There were consistent homeworks to grade, materials to prepare, and lessons to plan out. She would make things out of construction paper (and we'd help her), or spend alot of time with MS Word making handouts for the next day, etc.
Do you honestly think all those lessons that teachers teach all day long magically prepare themselves? While it does get easier after a few years, there's ALWAYS extra stuff to do. And with textbooks and curriculums changing, as well as moving teachers around, the lessons are never static from one year to the next.
I've also heard the "we have to take classes in the summer". I know teachers and maybe once every 5 years do they take a class.
Well, my mother did go through extra night classes for several years to earn her Masters in Education, but as you say not all teachers do that.
If teachers would ditch the unions and tenure they might start being considered professionals along with doctors/lawywers/engineers. This might allow the good teachers to actually be compensated above the average and get people into the profession.
Unions and tenure are the things keeping the teachers from being exploited as just cheap labor, why do you want the teachers to get rid of them first? How about the schools (really the state and municipal governments) offer them professional salaries thus making the need for unions and tenures obsolete?
Re:Only a shortage for the brilliant (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're (you in the plural sense of anyone reading this) disappointed by your $50k salary in science, blame your fellow scientists who are all too happy to accept such a pathetic salary when they could get double that as an auto mechanic. Take a look at the other comments here to find them.
Re:For math... (Score:3, Insightful)
$40k to start? For nine months of work? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say
Re:The one you like (Score:1, Insightful)
You are crying sour grapes because you have been unable to capitalize on your skills while others less capable outearn you at mach speed.
Re:The one you like (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW, renting versus owning is no longer such an obvious choice either. In many places in this country you will throw away $1000+ a month simply on interest, taxes and insurance, not to mention maintenance. Often its wiser to spend that $1000 on a decent apartment then sock the extra you would be paying in principal into a good investment. Possibly real-estate even, but not necessarily your real-estate. It all depends upon where you live in the market.
Re:The one you like (Score:5, Insightful)
No man has true freedom unless his passive income exceeds his living expenses. Only once you reach this level of freedom (which corresponds to having about $800k well-invested in most of the USA), can you really do whatever the hell you are truly passionate about, with no compromises.
The quickest way to get there, for most people, is to get a college degree in a field with high market value, live cheap, and invest everything you can in revenue-generating business that you don't have to manage (so you can keep working on what you specialize in). ETFs (like DIA) make this REALLY easy to do. If you can stomach extra volatility, leveraged ETFs (like DDM) could greatly shorten the time it takes for you to be be a self-made trust-fund baby (er... middle aged person).
Advice of "do whatever you're most interested in [regardless of pay]" sounds nice, and may be more fun in the short term, but it is much less likely to bring you true freedom than being a "money whore."
When you can live off of your investments, you can change jobs, contracts, and careers at will. Otherwise, you will be filling out TPS reports, all-the-while chained to your current job for the ability to feed yourself and afford medical care.
Re:I could not disagree more (Score:3, Insightful)
There are definitely areas where it's easier than others, and the system is making the socio-economic gaps bigger but you can do it. I know several people who are completely debt free (excluding their mortgages) and living on modest (for the DC area) incomes quite well. The trick is to make the decision not to become a consumer whore and think you have to "keep up with the Joneses". If you can resist the urge to live a "desparate housewife" type of lifestyle, then living within your means and staying debt free really isn't that hard at all.
Re:The one you like (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I could not disagree more (Score:3, Insightful)
Psychological studies also seem to back up the theories that stuff, power (actually, control), and sex make people happy.
Desiring these things does not lead to "frustration, deeper debt, and hopelessness." Bad finance management is what causes those problems. You have your causation confused.
Re:The one you like (Score:3, Insightful)
-7.5% FICA (-2250)
-5% 401(k) (-1500)
-15% IRS (-4500)
-$300 a month for student loans (using your example) (-3600)
=$18k a year take home = $1,500 a month to live on.
Rent on a 700sf apartment, 1br/1ba, in just about anywhere that has tech jobs nearby (California, Boston area, etc) will run you $800 a month easy. $700 a month for a complete dive in a crack infested neighborhood.
Electricity / heat / water - $100 / month (being conservative).
Cable (internet / maybe also tv) - $60 / month.
Phone (cell or land-line) - $40 a month
Car insurance for a young single man - $100 / month
I'm going to assume a car that runs but is older (no payment). Maintenance ($50/mo), gas ($100/mo) : $150 / month
That leaves $350 a month.
Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner on $10 a day is not unreasonable, for a healthy diet including eggs, bread, milk, coffee, meat, cheese - all the things a software engineer eats.
That leaves $50 a month for :
clothing (for working in an office setting)
laundry (once a month, whether it needs it or not)
ethanol (beer / liquor)
music
hardware upgrades (have to keep current)
WoW subscription
furnishing your home
going on dates
chocolate
and emergencies.
I'm not saying it can't be done - I've lived on less (was only making $25k a year right out of college) - I'm just saying it isn't the kind of life that you might expect for a degreed professional software engineer.
For comparison, assuming instead had you gone into the military as a boot-camp recruit (E1) and did five years (four years instead of college, plus you would be in your fifth year) and made E5 (not difficult, it is like a second class or something, still a nobody with no authority or responsibility) according to the pay charts found here [dod.mil] in San Diego you would be making the equiv of about $50.5k a year, including housing and subsistance pay (but not including combat pay, no matter how rough things get in San Diego.) And no student loans, which is another $3,600 a year difference, bringing it up to an effective $54k a year. And no medical costs. And after less than 30 years you can retire at 100% of your base salary (that would mean retiring at 45 with a lifetime income of about $55k a year, plus or minus depending on how far up the food chain you made it.) As someone going on 40, the thought of being able to retire in five years at 100% of my base salary sounds really, really good right about now. A LOT better than waiting until I'm 65 or 68 or whatever they cranked it up to recently for the regular world.
And we keep hearing how 'under paid' the military enlisted are
Re:If they won't pay your salary... (Score:3, Insightful)
You need a house, a car, diapers for the kids. You're educated. You won't take less than 80k.
A company produces widgets which sell for $3.85 each. They have several competitors in a relatively mature market, and cannot raise prices significantly without losing net income.
They want to develop the next generation widget and have a target value of $4.35. They think the market is good, and the accountants have put a net-present-value of the new item at $4,000,000. The new widget will take 40 man years to develop, and the company has a combined overhead and profit of 80%.
So, to simplify, each employee necessary to develop this new widget is worth:
$4M/40my/180%=$55,600/yr.
If they pay more, the project is not viable. It doesn't matter how much mortagages cost in their area, if they can't make a profit on a person, then that person is not a good business decision.
If someone were to start offering the company a contract for $30 per new-widget, then that million dollar salary starts looking feasible. Of course, it won't happen unless the number of widget scientists is low, and the rich buyer makes their offer to your competitors. Otherwise, you'll get your $80k, and the company with keep the extra profit, making the shareholders (and likely your 401k) a little bit richer.
Of course, the smart widget scientist would see the opportunity to go market a $30 widget and start his own widget company...if he had the cash to do so. Otherwise, he needs to go let someone else front the cash and take the chance, and accept $55,600 as the salary which justifies his position. Or stop being a widget scientist.
Re:Teachers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The one you like (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The one you like (Score:3, Insightful)
So true. I went into Computer Science because I didn't want my family to face the same financial hardships my parents faced while raising me and my siblings. I'm not trying to abuse the system, or slack off, or produce anything but the best possible designs with thorough testing and superb documentation. But there are dozens of fields of knowledge that interest me, and I picked this one because I researched the matter and thought it was something I could stand that would also pay the bills.
I do enjoy my job, but not nearly so much that I enjoy arriving at work more than arriving at home after work.
Re:For math... (Score:4, Insightful)
Same advice as to anyone else... (Score:3, Insightful)
Keep your eye on the ball, which is 5 years from now, no matter when now is. That 40% you put into growing your money will compound no matter how poorly you manage it. In 5 years you will have a hell of a lot more money than you had before AND because you bought a house your housing investment will also appreciate and you can then sell and get something much nicer.
In 10 years you may even look like a respectable member of society AND you'll have enjoyed getting there.
So get a job, any job, that you like... and then live. Set your life up correctly, then relax and let time do the work for you.
Re:Only a shortage for the brilliant (Score:1, Insightful)
My story: PhD from a top 3 school in my field. Spent several years in research and gov't, somehow thinking I should use my PhD as a "real" scientist. Underpaid, overworked, and principally engaged in the production of grant applications and power point presentations.
Then I got wise, my friend.
I answered an ad on Monster and joined a patent law firm as a technical consultant. $90K to start in 2002. They trained me to write and prosecute patents well enough that I easily passed the USPTO patent agent's exam. After three years, I switched firms to one that (1) paid me $120K and (2) agreed to send me to law school at night. By "send me," I mean they are paying for the tuition, which effectively adds another $24K a year to my compensation. It's not all that uncommon, strange though it may sound, though it isn't offered by all firms and is generally only offered to those with advanced degrees or other valuable experience.
For me, law school is a gigantic time sink and a lot less interesting than I thought it might be, but it's doable, and certainly less painful than my PhD. Plus, I still have that $120K day job. Beats the hell out of a grad school stipend any day.
You could, of course, go to law school during the day and get it over in 3 years instead of 4 at night. However, you'll pay for it yourself, you won't get the experience of working at a firm, and you'll be fighting for a job with the other unexperienced law school grads. Still, if you can snag a job at one of the larger patent firms, you could start at $160K (with no experience). If you go the part time route and your firm credits your experience as a patent agent, you might start closer to $200K on graduating. And if you manage to make partner--average profit per partner at large patent firms is running about 700-900K$ per year these days.
Now, if you take this route, some of your old scientist buddies will not understand what you are doing, or will think you are some kind of heretic, never mind your average
Re:For math... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actuary is a good path worth a lot of money, but the training is brutal and so is the cut rate. I got a degree in math and was making 90K as a software developer within 4 years. I took a bit of a hit at the end of the .com bubble and then back to normal. Unfortunately, I wouldn't wish the politics of most IT environments on anyone.
Take your pick, though. Any job that pays well is going to have it's commensurate load of shit to deal with. Actuaries have brutal training and testing to endure. Doctors go through Internship Hell. IT people pretty live in Hell for their entire career...what you think Dilbert is funny because it isn't true? :)
If you're good at Math and Science, here is your first most important job: work out a plan for retiring comfortably at 40 right after you get out of school. It is a completely achievable goal if you manage your expectation, and giving some thought to what you want to do in the long-term will be worth more than any salary.
Figure out the budget and figure 3-5% salary increase each year, then look at costs, and how much you'll pay to live, travel, and have fun. Then get the one major investment--a home--figured out (how much a month and what maturity), and adjust the prices for each of those things until you find what you are happy with. It will tell you how much money you actually need and you will be a lot more efficient than most people starting out that have visions of high payed jobs dancing in their heads. It's not really that hard and the estimate will be wrong, but you will be a decade ahead of many people because most people chase the big dollar signs for quite a few years before they decide to look at the horizon and see if they are driving their financial life off a cliff or into a desert. Perhaps the worst situation is "waiting to live". That situation where you sacrifice a lot of your current happiness for some goal in the future that you have no concrete plan to reach. Budget for current happiness.
Once you have a ballpark number, THEN you can adjust your reality and then you can make an intelligent choice of money vs. joy with regard to occupation and then you will have a good context for deciding which of the many options listed in this thread and available elsewhere are worth it. But again, if you just wanted money, IT is a typical example of where to find it.
That's a VERY good question .... (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, actually very few thanks to H1B/L1 visas and American businesses deciding that they don't want to pay free market rates for native technical labor (although it's just dandy for their products). Whenever the pool of available native tech talent starts to get the slightest bit tight they go to Congress screaming "We need more imported tech labor!!!". Of course the truth is that they don't need more imported tech labor, they just want it given they can pay imported labor far less (especially in urban areas where the cost of living is high, where a great majority of tech jobs tend to be today) and can keep them captive (i.e., the imported labor can't quit to find a better job/more pay once they're here without risking their visas and associated deportation). It's all basically a scam (note the current Charlie Foxtrot in progress regarding the proposed immigration law overhaul) to keep business fatcats from paying people market value for their technical skills.
So what's been the glaring end result of these visa policies? The pool of native tech talent continues to drop because nobody wants to work for artificially suppressed wages (i.e., the free market at work), so the businesses then scream even louder to Congress for more imported tech labor to thwart what are basically the effects of the free market further depressing the outlook for native techies. Technical work has now gone the same way as textiles and agriculture in that it's a trade for a dedicated, cheap labor pool.
Most science majors I know actually make less than teachers (in Texas teachers make $38-40K to start for nine months of work).
Rest assured if the business types have their way it will continue to be so; do yourself a favor and go to business or law school.