Thinking about switching from Physics to Maths, but worried about the job outlook...

Thinking about switching from Physics to Maths, but worried about the job outlook. Can any math major shills help me here? This unemployment percentage seems a bit high.

Uni I'm attending has a top 30 math program for what its worth.

I will be taking statistics/probablity courses as I progress now. God knows where I'll work, but there's tons of jobs for math majors who can do risk analysis type of shit. You could convince your employer that cauchy sequences or some shit can somehow be applied to keep his company afloat.

What do you want to do? You usually can't just graduate and say, "Time to find a job!" If you don't have a good plan, of course you'll be unemployed. If you do have a good plan, you'll have a good job within a year of graduation at worst.

I've been looking into some jobs maths majors do; OR and Investment analysis seem to be the most interesting to me. I like the idea of using maths for real world applications.

My worry is that I'll be stuck teaching high school math (although I feel like I have that same fear if I major in Physics). How competent do I have to be to pursue these more lucrative careers?

whether you get a good job or not is almost entirely dependent on your internship situation in college. thats actually where you build a marketable skillset.

like said, you gotta have a plan and you gotta start executing it immediately. sitting on your ass over the summer is a one way trip to the unemployment line. you literally need an internship to get an internship nowadays, so you are going to take some craptastic gig your first summer or two and try to leverage that into a better one for your last two summers.

The most important thing is to do internships over the summer.

>How competent do I have to be
Competent enough study, work hard, and research how people get those jobs. There's nothing magical about it.
I never went into financial stuff because I don't care for it whatsoever, and every actuary I ever spoke to said something along the lines of "I make good money but I hate the work I do." I figure if I'm going to spend 40 hours a week working, I'd rather have a job I enjoy than something I don't enjoy that's "lucrative."

Internships aren't necessary for some math pursuits. I never got one and I got a job 7 months after graduating making $70K in a city where that is very, very good money (as opposed to LA or San Francisco). However, I probably would have found a job sooner if I had had an internship. Instead, I spent my spare time programming and making a portfolio.

How useful are online courses from websites like edx. org or coursera.org? Are the credentials gained worth it for future job aspects?

If you didn't pay money for the certificate or degree, it probably won't mean much to your employer. If you can have work to showcase that proves you learned something, then show them that.
E.g. don't say "I completed codacademy's web development course," say "I programmed both the front end and the back end of this neat web app I made, here's where you can find it."

As far as online courses go: Just find a good textbook on a subject and read it. Learning to read textbooks is a fantastic skill to have.