Add it up -- Mathematicians earn top pick as the best job
Filed under: Career
If you thought math was just a boring grade school subject, you might be kicking yourself now for not putting in more effort. CareerCast.com, a new job-search site, evaluated 200 professions in a study that came out today and named mathematicians as their top pick.
To determine rankings, the study evaluated income, physical demands, stress, and employment outlook.
What makes mathematics such a hot field? The working conditions are typically comfortable, especially when compared to brick layer and sewage-plant operator, just some of the other professions in the study. Mathematicians work indoors with no physical strain, and they don't have to deal with toxins or noisy machinery. Even better, the job comes with a nice payday. The survey estimated the annual salary of a mathematician is $94,160.
Jennifer Courter, a mathematician for 3D-visualization software maker Mental Images Inc. in San Francisco, told the Wall Street Journal that her job allows her to problem-solve, which she says, to her, is calming. A mathematical-based computer software she and her colleagues developed was used in the production of such blockbuster films as The Matrix and Speed Racer.
Jobs that fared well in the survey included those that had little physical labor, avoided exposure to the elements, and steady, predictable hours. Labor-intensive jobs that put workers outside ranked low, with the bottom three jobs being taxi driver, dairy farmer, and lumberjack.
I'm happy to say that the job of an accountant made the top ten, and I'd have to agree. It's also interesting to note that four of the top 10 jobs are heavily reliant on math skills, so students should take that into account when they're busy dissing the business of numbers. I have to question the validity of the survey, however, when I see the job of parole officer at number 13. I once had that job, and the highlights were low pay and days spent in bad neighborhoods doing "home visits." I'll stick with numbers, thank you.
Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-07-2009 @ 9:42PM
Person said...
I have to say, I don't agree with the criteria for the survey.
The best jobs had no physical labor or exposure to the elements? Not everybody likes sitting inside on their butt all day. Personally, I'd take digging a hole with a shovel over being glued to a uncomfortable office chair with florescent lighting and nothing to do all day but algebra.
Dairy farmer and lumberjack were the worst jobs? Whatever happened to fresh air and sunshine?
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1-08-2009 @ 12:33PM
larry said...
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1-08-2009 @ 7:36PM
Norce Codine said...
This article is pure propaganda. As a junior mathematician myself, I make about 10.000 dollars a year, as a research assistant/part-time instructor. Thats what two degrees in the hardest academic field got me. That woman described in the article does NOT represent us by a longshot, as what she does has nothing to do with mathematics. Its insanity telling young people that "math is the future". My future is a 16 year old car that smokes its way to campus every day. Half of my former classmates are seeking miserable positions on a year-to-year basis across the globe.
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1-12-2009 @ 2:10PM
Russell said...
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learned as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement. Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the real and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the natural world.
Bertrand Russell
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1-14-2009 @ 6:00PM
john said...
I think this article forgets to mention that research in mathematics is not lucrative while going to work for some industry that creates products is lucrative. So if you want to teach math and do research the pay is not comparable to non academic/ teaching positions. However as a first hand witness to the academic world it is pretty laid back once you have been tenured, but yeah the pay is terrible for how hard it is to get any math degree at any level if your goal is to teach or be an academic.
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