Thread: Seeking a Math Student or Professor to discuss Mathematics route.

As the title suggests, I'd like some suggestions about what to do with my mathematics career. I am an undergraduate student on my 3rd year and I still do not have a clear path in mind. I am also interested in accounting and finance. You can respond to this post, or send me an email to julius.jackson08@yahoo.com.

Hey juliusjackson08.

There are many different kinds of careers in these fields for analytic people, but I'll make a few of my own suggestions. Also for a major decision, do your homework and come to your own conclusions.

The first note is that you want to know the jobs that have specific professional qualifications. Some of these include things like actuarial work (which is a licensed profession with very hard exams mainly in statistics and math for insurance) as well as certain other risk management roles. So if you want to get into these kinds of roles, you need to check how to get licensed since there are legal requirements and hurdles you need to jump over.

With regards to different kinds of roles, I would suggest you look at different analytic positions. Statistics can be used for modelling work (all kinds of work from credit modelling that banks use for looking at credit cards, mortgages, personal loans, business loans and so on) as well for analyst and advisory work (using analytic skills to make suggestions, provide interpretations and to facilitate decision making for managers who need to make decisions).

There is also the "analytics" field which is really data mining for non-corporate people (they like fancy words that sound important). Accounting firms, government departments, banks, and many different kinds of employers use data mining for a variety of reasons including fraud detection, financial fore-casting, stability analysis (making sure policies and decisions are made that don't statistically make things hit the fan) and other projects that help decision makers do their job.

In fact there are a lot of areas that do modelling that need people to not only derive the models, but to simulate them and make sense of them but are not under a standard vanilla definition like "data mining" or "analytics".

If you have some decent software development experience then consider how this can be used in those sectors as well.