I’m trying to help my high school junior son find his professional way in the world. As you might expect, we are at the stage of screening potential colleges.
He’s a strong student overall, but has particularly strong gifts in math and strategy. On the whole, he’s much stronger in STEM than humanities, but holds his own in those areas. (e.g., while we are awaiting the SAT results, his junior-your PSAT translates to 780 – 800 in math, and 710-730 verbal).
He would like to find a career that harnesses his ability in math and strategy. While you need to find a career that you are excited about, he seems particularly oriented towards finding one that pays well, especially during the prime time of the career. I think he’s indifferent as to whether the career also involves science or not. Also, he’s willing to work hard and has in school, but isn’t looking to make his job dominiate of his nights and weekends.
He doesn’t have tremendous social skills. They’re not horrible, but he’s not going to be a fraternity president and probably wouldn’t even be in such an organization. More of the charming geeky nerd variety.
I realize that’s a thumbnail portrait of a young man, but with that set, what careers would you target and, consequently, what major or majors and additional courses of study which you pursuing college?
I am a lawyer, which I’m pretty certain would not be his chosen profession, so I just don’t have much experience to aid him in his career search in fields likely to interest him.
If he likes a combination of math and business strategy, he should look into a career in data analytics. This could be achieved through a variety of college majors since the field is still somewhat nascent, but rapidly growing. Pretty much any fortune 100 company now requires candidates business strategy candidates with the ability to run models using big data tools such as Hive, Hadoop, Spark, R, etc. This is because companies these days have access to trillions more datapoints than they did a decade ago and determining the mathematical significance behind that data is driving the decisions of today’s most successful companies. This isn’t limited to tech companies anymore so he could work in any industry with this skillset. In terms of college major, any combination of comp sci, business, and math could pursue this career track, but if not including at least a minor in comp sci, he would have to learn some of the languages on his own, which is what I did.
For college majors, perhaps operations research or industrial engineering? Also, there are the usual ones like applied math, statistics, computer science, perhaps a math-heavy version of economics if offered. Business majors and other majors in business schools may not be math-heavy enough for someone who really like math.
I think any of the majors ucbalumnus mentioned is appropriate, although I see computer science as the most indicated, given not only his qualities, but the growth prospects of areas within that field.