Students are in no position to judge the relevancy of what they are learning.
I was probably the worst math student in the department when I was at Denison University from 1978 to 1982.
My high school career was poor to middling, and I felt completing a math major, in addition to an econ major, would cleanse my past.
I started all the way back at pre-calc, and as I worked my way up through math courses, my GPA went down. Happily, whatever math skills I gained through osmosis enabled a ~4.0 in economics.
Still, at the mathematics building it was bad. I remember getting a 23 on a statistics exam . . . My GPA in math was below 3.0, but how much further I didn’t want to know . . . Taking actuarial tests twice, once in Scotland no less, where actuarial science was invented, and once in Philadelphia, where I lived, I failed miserably, both times . . . Math professors contacted for a graduate school recommendation couldn’t even remember me.
Unfortunately, if anyone told me how often gainful employment rested upon, in one respect or another, the GPA in one’s major, I might have rethought the math major strategy.
But the student is in no position to judge when their lessons might become relevant.
About four months after graduation, I got a job in publishing. It involved reading a lot of prospectuses, and knowing how to do the basic algebra that was required probably got me the job.
Later in graduate business school, having quantitative skills eased my way and provided a significant competitive advantage over other students, some of whom were innumerate.
I parleyed my publishing experience into a career as a financial writer for the media and for corporations. Because I knew math, I had chops, or at least my clients thought I did.
Still, by the standard of a real mathematician, I used little real math. Working with financial statements was important – and yes, these statements had numbers – but the required skill was understanding them well enough to draw and expound upon well-founded (or at the very least tenable) inferences.
At that juncture, math wasn’t so much a skill set as a mindset. It was the discipline that enabled me to organize words into sentences into paragraphs into complete works, all with, as I like to tell myself, numerical order and precision.
Now, today, as a financial writer and a media relations consultant, the stars have finally aligned, at least as it concerns why my focus on mathematics in college turned out right.
With respect to consulting on the media, the surest way to get a client exposure, whether it’s CNBC, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, is to develop statistically valid surveys. With all of this Big Data coming out of clients’ operations, this is easy. Easy that is, if you understand statistics, sample sizes, linear and (admittedly, only on rare occasions) multivariate regression analysis as well as Analysis of Variance or ANOVA.
A math degree even helps with statistically invalid surveys, because if you can explain the shortcomings of what you are presenting to a reporter or producer based on the underlying math, they feel informed well enough to use it anyway.
In addition to my grade point average in math, the other thing I don’t want to think about is how much math I’ve forgotten since 1982. I’ll say this: my understanding of the math I do remember has grown, attributable to mulling it over for about 35 years, generally in the pursuit of suburban labors such as cutting the grass or shoveling the driveway.
It may be altogether anticlimactic to mention it, but a simple math problem apparently vexed the university’s development office, and has largely kept me out of their sights. In 2008, I was asked to teach entrepreneurship for a day during January term. The appointment put me on the radar of development, and I told them this: Tell me the differential in my tuition as a result of contributions from the endowment, compounded with a profitable rate of interest since graduation, and I would pay them that amount.
It’s been a while since graduation, and it’s probably a big number now. Ultimately, I’ll likely have to use a payment plan to make good on my school’s investment.
