An incoming freshman sent me an email recently:
"Lately I've been tossing the idea around of maybe
changing to computer or electrical engineering because
I'm afraid that I won't have as many jobs available
with a math major. I'm not sure if my fears are
valid, but I was wondering if you could maybe tell me,
in your experience, how sought after math majors are
and by which employers."
"What would be the biggest
differences between engineering and math majors, and
in which year would the curriculum for the majors
start to specialize?"
"Why did you choose to study
mathematics, and when did you realize that you wanted
to study math specifically? I'm not sure which path I
would be better suited for, so I'm trying to gather as
much information as possible to make my decision. I
appreciate your time in helping me, and I look forward
to seeing you either at FASET next week or when school
starts. Thank you very much. "
This is a whole load of questions!
The general trend is one that I (Michael Lacey) recognize from my time as the
undergrad director.
First, there isn't a big rush to choose. Most of the engineering
curriculum parallels that of Math, up through Diff Eq.
Second, it's natural from the freshman's part. The engineering
programs are very strong, and the message that they receive from
students is that there is no jobs in Math.
Third, the School of Math has a very strong record in training very high
quality students. Some of these highlights are availible at the
Undergrad Placement page. David Vener (spring 2001) and Blair
Dowling (spring 2003) won the highest academic honors on the Georgia
Tech campus. David is in graduate school at MIT. Blair at Princeton.
[This page is not more complete, since I have to rely on the 'kindness
of strangers' for it, and I have a few other things to do as well!]
And in 2003, GT undergrads won 3 out of 33 NSF Graduate Fellowships in
Mathematics. The only other university to get more than one award was Harvard, and they got 2.
Aside from the highest acheivers, the School of Math has a number of
very sophisticated and accomplished double majors.
Nick Bronn, (EE& Math) Cambridge Gates Fellow,
NSF Grad Fellow, at MIT
David Vener (Phy & Math) NSF Grad Fellow at MIT
(I think he was a Prez Scholar.)
Ganesh Sundramoorthi (EE and Math) In grad school at EE
at GT this fall.
Blair Dowling (CS & Math) (Prez Scholar) Princeton Grad School in the
Fall. 12 students are admitted to grad school, so getting in is
a mark of excellence!
David Eger (CS & Math) Fulbright Fellow. Grad school in CS at Carneigie
Mellon.
Nathan Bell (CS & Math) Doing a super Senior Project, Grad School in CS,
at Univ Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Clark Alexander (Math and Physics) is going to grad school at Northwestern.
Current Double Majors include
Steven Lansel (Math and EE)
Andrew Stimpson (Math and Physics)
Justin Melvin (ChemE and Math)
Derrick Coetzee (CS and Math)
These are just the names that come to mind. About 25% of the
majors are double majors. The most current list is at the
math majors
emails web page.
I'll stop here, since the math majors themselves have some strong opinions about this one. Maybe some of them will comment.
I entered GT a few years ago as a civil engineering major. By the end of the first year I had switched majors to mathematics and I can state exactly why. As all entering students who do not grow up with mathematician parents, we believe that the only thing available for math majors is teaching. Well that's great if you want to teach math, but fortunately it isn't true. Mathematics is a very broad degree. While it doesn't seem that you don't learn much "real world" practical stuff, it doens't really matter that much. Mathematics teaches you how to think logically. Employers are not interested generally in how well you did in Calc or Diff Eqs or PDEs or any of that. Employers are really interested in how well you can solve problems. Engineering and mathematics are both excellent degrees for this purpose. However the problem solving skills you acquire in math vs engineering are quite different. Engineering will teach you how to solve very practical problems. You will look up lots of information in tables, look up formulas and come up with an answer that is pretty close to exact, but it not exact. Mathematics teaches you to solve problems using nothin more than logic. Once you have gained sufficient background in problem solving, looking up information is nothing more than completing a problem which in principle has already been solved.
The most important thing to remember though is that if you truly love what you do, there is a job for you. Rita Colwell would back me up on that (because she said it before I did) and in case you're wondering who is Rita Colwell? She is the director of the National Science Foundation. If you intention is to do nothing more than achieve bling bling, then you should probably study math and economics and pursue higher education in one of those fields and go to wall street. If you want to teach math, study math. If you want to do engineering, you can still study math and take your electives in the engineering departments (that is the best thing about the math degree, that you are allotted many elective hours). If you want to go to law school, study math. If you want to study math great! If you want to study engineering that's great too, just make sure you enjoy what you study, otherwise GT can become miserable pretty quickly. Feel free to email me if I can answer any other questions for you about being a math undergrad at GT.
-Clark
Good observations. Math is really a way of thinking abstractly, more than any other discipline I'm aware of. From analyzing political polls and surveys to improving database search speed, there is a lot more to math than teaching.