What to do with a Maths Degree?

GCHQ

And never tell anyone what you do.

What to do with a Maths degree? Whatever the hell you want. Seriously. What is she interested in? She can apply her education to that. Maths is fundamental to everything.

Can’t really help with the specific question (I are a physicist, so don’t do proper maths) but I can sympathise with the OP. My daughter has also just graduated with a First (in her case Natural Sciences – basically Biology and Chemistry – at Durham) and is now back home trying to work out what she wants to do next. I blame the parents 🙂

You can become an actuary in Pensions or Insurance.

Insurance is probably the more lucrative route, particularly if you work at a Reinsurer or a Reinsurance broker

Are you saying flood and climate change is a bad idea ElShalimo?!

Nuclear, there’s a LOT of maths involved that goes hand in hand with reactor physics. EDF has a grad scheme

https://careers.edfenergy.com/job/Nr-Bridgwater-Graduate-Maths-Engineer/1114709201/

Schemes open and starting salary doesnt look shabby for a grad scheme!

@joshvegas – the actuary route usually has significantly better remuneration.

It depends on the motivtaion of the individual. Some people just want to make money, others want to contribute. When I got my applied maths degree from Sheff Poly I just wanted a job and sort of fell into engineering consultancy.

Go forth and multiply?

Why rush in to a career? Go and explore life, travel, find out who you are and what you like doing before some stranger on the internet, or worse your dad, finds you a job you hate shortly….

I’d imagine a maths degree gives you a lot of options – although for grad schemes it seems you’re looking a little bit late given she’s just qualified. Ideally for this year you’d have applied some time ago / looked at doing some internships over the summer.

I’m in banking – normal ringfence bank in the UK at one of the big 4 – rather then investment bank. Grad scheme comes in with a reasonable salary – especially for someone aged 24. They do 18 months on the scheme with 3 different job roles of 6 months in that time. From my experience looking after grads once they’re into the final 6 months there is a fair amount of pressure applied to decide what they want to do as their first permanent job and get it arranged as early as possible in that final 6 months.

If she’s in London then there are so many finance options – but if looking at investment banking just be aware the pressure there is intense and she’ll be expected to work really quite long hours. Money is good obviously but I wouldn’t trade my life for the salary personally. YMMV.

Also just be a bit wary of the American banks like Citi / Bank of America / JP Morgan – the culture there is very different to UK employers. I think Wells Fargo is meant to be the nicest US bank to work for.

The quality of some of our grads coming in has been amazing the last couple of years – our last one had an advanced maths degree and one of our analysts was really impressed with some of the work he did on placement with our team.

In finance / banking you really need to push for a career though – unless you find a senior sponsor you need to network as much as you can and really push for the next job. Generally I’ve found there isn’t really a pathway and people aren’t going to hand stuff to you on a plate.

Everything I hear / read suggests if you can get into the right kind of IT career then you have a lot of job opportunity in many different types of company and the earning potential is very decent. So I’d consider that too.

Honestly I’d say the only difficulty with maths is choosing what to do. Anything involving technical skills and numeracy will be crying out for them, because maths underpins all of the quantitative modelling in basically every scientific and economic field. Whereas a biologist for example might struggle to get a job in a heavily physics- and engineering-oriented field (not saying they can’t break out of the pigeon-hole but it’s rare). And I don’t just mean adding things up and doing basic sums. Lots of interesting challenging problems in all areas you can think of.

I’ve worked (and published papers) in engineering, astronomy, agriculture, climate and weather (mostly here covering a very wide range of topics within this area), epidemiology. Oh, bicycle engineering, which was a bit of a side-project. I may have missed one or two things. Finance! I forgot the finance stuff.

I also got to travel the world a bit which was interesting.

It’s nearly 20 years since I graduated.  A first class degree in Maths should open up plenty of doors. This website used to be the place to look for jobs as a graduate.

https://www.milkround.com/

Her choices are not limited to using Maths. Loads of companies will take you on graduate schemes. Look at some of the big FTSE100 companies and the like to see what is on offer.  I did chemistry and did a general management scheme at a fruit juice factory in Bridgwater. I eventually moved back into Chemistry years later but learnt a huge amount in those 2 years.

My wife did Biochemistry and ended up doing IT and management stuff at Accenture. After about 15 years she moved to the civil service.  When I’ve been involved in grad recruitment, often the degree doesn’t matter. Many places are looking for a broad range of skills, intelligence, self motivation and ability to learn. A degree is one way of showing that.

I’d suggest she has a think about what she likes doing in very broad terms. I like a mixture of practical and theoretical problem solving along with some creative thinking. I do (chemical) product development which lends itself well to that. Lab work, office work, small scale through to factory scale. Get to tinker with equipment as well as the “bangs and smells” of mixing things together.

Companies me and my wife looked at.

GSK (my elder sister did the graduate scheme there)
Pfizer
Astra Zeneca
Loreal
Deageo
HSBC
“The big 4” accountancy/consultancy firms
I’d look at civil service options. There are some really interesting careers available. They have a website.

Try and understand culture as much as job when you look at these places. I did not like Finance and consulting and moved away from that fairly early. My wife was more keen and did well at Accenture until she took redundancy – it is ruthless though – often long hours and very competitive.

My personal opinion, assuming a desire for a fairly normal career,  would be to suggest getting onto a grad scheme in a big multinational and think big. They will have the best opportunities for training and career development in the early stages. Do that for a few years and then see where it takes you.

I would also consider some “exploration” either literally going travelling or doing some unusual work. A nice steady career makes for a comfortable life but not always the most exciting. I’ve got a couple of friends getting by riding bikes. One raced the Amstel Gold this year and the other spends his days doing ultra distance Gravel. My younger sister graduate around 2008 so there were no jobs. She went out to work for a charity in Kenya for a few months, got a permanent position and lived there for 3 years before coming back to the UK.

I have a maths degree!

Just be aware that there are IMO quite limited opportunites to really stretch yourself on the maths side of things even in quite mathematical jobs.

I ruled out finance in London as I just heard so much about long hours and stress.

I’ve done quite mathematical software engineering in defence and automotive (driver assist type algorithms) but often the work is really reading, understanding and implementing something from a research paper. For commerical stuff you’re often looking to make things robust and reliable, which means staying away from cutting edge reserach until it’s been proven in acedmia or by people with more time/money to spare.
Startups can be different so might be worth looking at.

Most people from my uni ended up in Acturial Science or Software Engineering. You can combine both, Actuaries are often quite stuck in their ways and the industry is a very behind on the software side so it needs improving. I did a contract at one place and their version control system was emailing around Excel spreadsheets and Python scripts with a version number appended.

There’s lots of talk about AI taking lots of software engineering jobs at the moment. Seems a very long way off to me, but Actuarial Science is probably safer from that, who knows.

Also, as an Actuary you have more client contact and relationships with customers which adds value beyond your skills/knowledge, whereas with Software Engineers you are often just a cog in a machine and more easily replaced (on average, theres exceptions to this obvs,,)

My nephew graduated with a maths with physics degree from Bristol. He now works for a company working in cyber security for banks. He has tried to explain to me what he does which seems mostly related to developing software.

@joshvegas – the actuary route usually has significantly better remuneration.

Tell me about it.

Actually work to improve the situation, get peanuts.

https://www.gchq-careers.co.uk/our-careers/specialist-roles/mathematics-cryptography.html

Although I suspect that would involve a move to the West Country

For stuff that really uses the maths, the question would be what sort of maths is she good at, not just can do it, but really “gets” it? She should know by now.

e.g. Stats and probability, understanding different distributions and relationships between them etc – data science, some parts of ML. Would require an aptitude for computers, though this can be learnt. Know any python/scipy/numpy/pandas?

Or linear algebra and a good intuitive understanding of geometry? Computer vision and robotics is a lot of that made real.

There are also lots of simulation and modelling jobs that can be a mix of the above depending on the domain.

Logics etc and symbolic reasoning and representations? Sadly yet to have its big day (I have a PhD in this area applied to AI) but still finds its place in formal methods and verification, safety critical systems engineering etc.

And there are lots of areas of maths I’ve not touched on… what flavour’s favourite?

I would say, these days maths is applied through computers, what skills are useful there is quite field dependent through.

With alll the talent she has, has she considered being a bad guy?

I came into it from the Engineering side, but working for an Airline is really interesting and has some good benefits.

My lot have some really clever people doing all sorts of financial and operational analysis, data science,  engineering etc and I find it nice that I can connect the work I do with something easily tangible and satisfying (people going on holiday).

The industry tends to pay well compared to others – the job I do could transfer easily from automotive, manufacturing, production, rail, nuclear, oil and gas etc, but the pay at an airline is up the higher end with Nuclear/O&G relative to the others – the same is relatively true for a lot of roles I believe. I got a ~50% rise doing a job on buses with wheels, to the same job on buses with wings.

Neither of these are my lot, however from SW London you have BA and Virgin at multiple sites which is what made me think of posting.

I’m not so convinced about BA , but Virgin seem like a good bunch, I’ve visited them a few times for various projects and meetings and it struck me as some where good to work – I havent checked details closely but they have a bunch of jobs up on their website that could be the right kind of areas.

The industry took a kicking during covid, the flipside is generally good benefits, maybe a bit of travel etc, and as above I just find it ‘nice’ to do a job with such easily visible results, still a little grin ever time I look out the office window as one of our Jets takes off.

still a little grin ever time I look out the office window as one of our Jets takes off.

And a bit more of the planet dies ?

Safety Engineer is another interesting career for Maths grads (if you’re interested in it).

It’s basically working on nuclear installations like power stations and working with logic systems. You get to travel a bit if you want to and nuclear isn’t going away any time soon