Where do I go as a math major?

broken_symlink
Sat, 12 Feb 2011 10:08:36 +0000

I’ve started looking for summer internships. I’m currently a junior math major and physics minor. I think I am interested in going into finance or accounting. The problem is that I haven’t taken any courses in either of these areas. The only thing I have is one introductory course in economics.

Anyway, I have a lot of experience in IT and programming used to be a hobby of mine in high school. I have self taught myself a number of different programming languages, but I’m not really interested in going into that field anymore. However, I’m not completely opposed to applying to a few of these types of internships simply as a backup plan. Doing this stuff for one summer won’t kill me. I just don’t want to do it for the rest of my life.

I had an appointment with career services two weeks ago, and the lady there just talked a mile a minute. She was very much into pushing me into doing an internship for credit which really isn’t practical for me. It would cost too much to do it. She really helped me with my resume though and tore it apart. I think its in much better shape now. My school doesn’t really have a lot of math and science majors since its a liberal arts school, so the career services is much more oriented towards things like english, psychology (by far the biggest major and department), and so on.

I guess what I’m really wondering is what are the chances for a pure math major ending up in finance if I don’t have any experience/coursework? This is just a goal for the summer.

My long term goal is to get a phd in math, and by this summer I will have a solid year of work with a professor. I just need to make money this summer to help my parents pay for school. So, I figured instead of getting a job at a supermarket or something, now is the time to try to put my skills to use.

If anyone has any other suggestions for possible fields to look into that would help a lot. I should also mention the other problem I have is that I haven’t taken any statistics courses. Which a lot of internships I’ve looked at so far for math majors would really like an applicant to have.

I applied to a few internships in finance/accounting at Intel and IBM, and one local bank. I also applied to some energy company done the street from my school that is looking for math majors. I’m not completely sure what the internships at the energy company entails though.