Ask Slashdot: What To Do With a Math Degree?

First time accepted submitter badmojo17 writes "After achieving her lifelong dream of becoming a public school math teacher, my wife has found the profession to be much more frustrating than she ever expected. She could deal with having a group of disrespectful criminals as students if she had competent administrators supporting her, but the sad truth is that her administration causes more problems on a daily basis than her students do. Our question is this: what other professions are open to a bright young woman with a bachelor's degree in math and a master's degree in education? Without further education, what types of positions or companies might be interested in her as an employee?"

Re:NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong about that. Yes, top of their field mathematicians have a place. But frankly, very few people have the training to be cryptanalysts even with a Ph.D. under their belt. There's theoretical cryptography, and there's real world cryptography; virtually everyone will require additional training to do the job, and if you need stronger theory, the feds give great education benefits. A B.S. in mathematics will definitely get you looked at if you've got a decent GPA or work history. Look at nsa.gov for job postings under mathematics and cryptanalysis; if you've got any programming background as well, they'll want you.

Re:Finance

[dr2chase]

Right, but she's already burnt out on working with flaming assholes.

Re:software dev?

[Mitchell314]

Just graduated with a math (BS) degree myself. My current only options are to fight for entry level programming jobs (which I have a temporary one) or to continue my education and get a degree that's actually useful. Problem is, while it sounds nice in theory as a compliment to computer science, by itself it does not give you the necessary basic skills to be even remotely competitive; you need experience from another source. Having a good grasp of logic does you no bloody good when nearly every employer wants a minimum of x years of experience in half a dozen different platforms/languages.

But, programming is the general area I would wish to get into, and it's something I'd recommend OP to look into to. But no matter what, you'll have to learn a lot more: be it in the workplace, on your own time, or in school. No getting around that. :p

Dunno how the education background figures into it. I guess it helps, you have to break down complex concepts so that students can learn it. In programming, you pretty much have to break down complex processes to simpler subroutines and instructions. Maybe it helps, but I don't know, education isn't my thing.