<p>You don’t get an “Applied Math” degree from Chicago. (Harvard has that as a separate concentration; Chicago doesn’t.)</p>
<p>Applied math covers a whole variety of things. The people who do “Math with a concentration in economics” are leaning towards applied math, and that is a great pathway to graduate study in economics, or work with consulting firms, hedge funds, trading firms . . . anyone who uses math as an analytical tool, which is a LOT of firms. I have a cousin who was an Applied Math concentrator at Harvard, and she’s in graduate school studying computational linguistics, which is apparently a hot discipline for software design, since it makes algorithms out of natural language.</p>
<p>Engineering and design use tons of applied math, too. And all those people who are trying to figure out what to sell you based on what you buy . . .</p>