Careers and Grad Programs with a B.S. in Math

juillet
Sat, 08 Feb 2014 21:00:52 +0000

It’s the rare entry-level data MA-educated scientist or computational statistician that makes $150,000 a year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that the average statistician makes $76,000 a year; a salary of just $121,000 puts you in the 90th percentile of statisticians. I think that some experienced PhD level statisticians can make that much, and maybe some MA-educated ones with more years (10+ I would guess - perhaps) but I think it’s much more realistic to expect that you won’t make that graduating with an MA right out of school. I think an entry-level data scientist can expect to make around $60-80K depending on the company and the location.

Operations researchers make on average $72,000; industrial engineers about $79,000 and software developers about $93,000. Even mathematicians make on average $101,000 per year. All of these median figures includes experienced mathematicians.

The other thing is that money isn’t everything. Personally, I love data science and computational statistics, but some people detest prob and stats - you have to like it, and like spending most of your day building models for analysis (although there is a lot of talking to people and going to meetings doing or assisting in presentations involved). Some people also don’t want to spend a lot of time translating statistics-speak into every day language for the business folk who have zero experience in statistics, which is difficult especially with complex models.

Also, sometimes industry matters - some people would prefer to be in education or healthcare over technology.