Open Thread, February 1-14, 2013

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

I'm currently a Ph.D. student in mathematics, which seems like it's not unheard of around here, and I'm beginning to realize (about halfway through the expected life of my program) that I'm not particularly interested in staying in academics.

What sorts of other career options are there, coming from pure mathematics?

And in particular I don't do anything related to graph theory, probability theory, or other fields with obvious connections to other career paths; what are some skills that would complement a PhD in mathematics on a resume?

The top of my list right now is programming; in particular it's pretty easy for me to turn my ideas into algorithms but I don't know the syntax of any language except python. I'm planning to make a list of common programming languages and then push through a dozen problems on Project Euler in each of them, but I'd like to have more ideas about how to make myself employable in a way that still involves lots of math.

11[anonymous]13y

Join the club. Over the past couple months I more or less decided that the guy I've been seeing for a year is the guy I want to spend my life with, which makes jaunting cross-country for six to ten years on post-docs much less appealing. [...] IIRC, you're American. There's a good amount of government work available: DoD, DoE, national labs, and so on. I'm aware of some people who parlayed their math PhD into the equivalent of an engineering MS, with all the job opportunities that opens up. Programming is the obvious choice, but I'm told one would want a paper trail (a git account, a blog, etc.) of contributions to various projects. It also sounds like you're still young enough to pivot a bit in your choice of field -- do you have an advisor yet?

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