Suggestions for math major

mathprof63
Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:36:52 +0000

As a math professor, I would concur that stats would be less competitive, and more employable. For some reason, a lot of math professors dissuade students from statistics, claiming something like it’s not “real math” or some such thing. Impressionable students then have this bias stuck in their heads. I graduated from a top math PhD program in 1994 into a very bad academic job market. The few interviews I got were because of my specialty in Applied Mathematics. Currently, in my department, any future tenure track openings are slated for stats or actuarial science etc. We recently advertised for a temporary position late in the hiring season, and the majority of applicants were from a pure math background - meaning they still had no offers as late as April. Even small regional universities seem to want to hire in stats or other more applied subfields of math- they have enough of the pure math folks, and are looking for courses to offer which would be better suited for employment. As academia keeps downsizing, and replaces tenure track faculty with temp faculty or adjuncts, the prospects for math PhD’s are not encouraging - it’s looking more like the humanities PhD market.

Still, if grad school in pure math is an aim, an REU is a must . There are more opportunities for women for getting into a top tier grad school, but they will still be competing with the tippy top folks (former olympiad winners, Putnam exam winners etc.), especially in pure math.
The American Mathematical Society (ams.org) has many articles on grad school and employment data. The Association for Women in Math ( www.awm-math.org ) also has information for undergrads.