Ask an unemployed math PhD anything

hah. Ok.

Breakfast is usually a bagel and cream cheese and a double espresso.

Lunch is a salad of some sort, usually with some chicken for protein. I also like sandwiches--tuna salad is my favorite.

Dinner is either something simple like grilled cheese or pasta unless my girlfriend is coming over and I'm cooking for her, then I'll mix things up.

What field?

math

>doesn't even know that math is divided into different fields after taking a "PhD"
No wonder you're unemployed then.

Broadly analysis. I did differential geometry in singular spaces to solve variational problems. So, more specifically calculus of variations, I suppose.

Sort of an older field which is probably why I felt so isolated in my research.

Perhaps it's obvious that the first reply wasn't me.

Also it's totes fine to not have periods in PhD as long as it's consistent, so the condescending quotes aren't really necessary.

Gotta check your AP style book, brah.

What attracted you to maths? Is it as practical job wise as chemistry or physics or even engineering? Are traps gay?

Mathematically speaking traps are not gay

I think what attracted me to math is what attracts everyone to it--I was super good at it as an undergrad. Then I just kept going because I thought that's what people good at math did.

A math PhD can get some good jobs outside academe, but it's not easy if it's pure math. You really have to focus on learning computer science or financial mathematics on your own during your time in grad school.

The friends i know in chemistry or engineering are much better off for industry jobs, but their graduate programs were also longer. I don't know anyone in physics, oddly enough.

I hypothesis that traps are not gay, but I need some NSF funding to do a full research study and find out.

/r9k/ tourist here

What do math PhD's do exactly? Are there private sector jobs for math PhD's?

Math PhDs can do lots of things. Some number of them do research and teach at a university level, but that number is way less than how many there are total. Probably some number also teach high school if they're burned out or otherwise just passionate about teaching.

Lots are involved in data science or computer science on the software side. Even if you don't learn a ton of coding as a student a pure math background gives you a pretty good base to start learning computer science.

There's also financial mathematics if you like that sort of thing. I don't know too much about it, though.

Can graduating in math get me a job in physics and vice versa ?

What tips do you give a silly undergraduate who nearly flunked off of a first intro-to-proofs class?

I used to be interested in Pure Math (real analysis and metric spaces seemed super cool to me), but because of how bad I did (60% was the highest quiz grade I got, 40% was lowest), I'm considering on either doing Chemistry (research in physical chem cuz that's comfy/fun for me), or double in Chemistry and Applied Math (PDE theory, Numerical Analysis, and Analysis interests me, and are generally useful).

Sorry for the redundant background info but tldr: how do I not suck at proofs? I feel like my weakness is generally starting it out.

Sorry for the redundant info from an undergrad :D

>appologysing twice for giving redundant information
>being redundant in your apology
>redundantly apologising for redundancy

With that diet, you're constipated. Two of your three meals are garbage-tier.

What advice would you give a math undergrad who would like to not end up as an unemployed PhD? In particular, I'd like to end up as en employed PhD so what are the do's and don'ts?

Also, I saw you mentioned how you used to have a gf that made much more than you. I will probably be in that boat soon. For now we are both students but she is in an application oriented career in which she could end up making way more than 6 figures while I will be making like 60k from academia. What are the tips and tricks to survive in this situation and specifically to not get cucked?

Can brainlets also get a PhD in pure maths? Do you know any who managed to get one?

wanna work for me? i can only pay you peanuts but i guess it's something

It depends on what you define by a job in physics or math. Probably for some jobs there is substantial overlap between the two, but obviously each is specific too.

Applied math is great, but there's still lots of proofs. In my into-proofs class i spent a lot of time in office hours because I had a hard time writing things down properly. If the instructor will spend time working with you it can really be transformational.

That said it's not really uncommon for lotsa people to do poorly in the first intro to proofs class. The graders are usually super particular about things there and you'll get better.

I mean. I didn't give you full details. I'll be just fine, don't worry. Dinner always has a salad, I put veggies and meat into my grilled cheese, and when I cook I make lots of varied things.

Does everything really need to be sorted into tiers to have a place here?

There are lotsa guides for how to do well in graduate school to set yourself up for an academic job. If you want an industry job, probably don't do pure math--since it's in general less relevant to non academic jobs.

The biggest mistake I made in graduate school was the topic I worked on. It's not something a lot of people still care about which made it hard to make connections or get postdoctoral positions.

When you're young money isn't super important and as a graduate student dating basically any non-student there will be some disparity in wages, just don't worry about it and realize that you have an interesting job and potential which is just as good as money right now. Just try to have a healthy relationship. For the girl I was with, I probably wouldn't have needed to work, but that came with a lot of baggage involving her family that I couldn't deal with and she was ultimately incredibly manipulative and I left.

Absolutely. At my program there were some stupid easy topics people studied.

You would be astounded how stupid some of the people who graduated from my (top 20) program were. One of them basically copied a paper and changed a few definitions for his thesis. He copied so much that the arXiv tagged it as "substantially similar" to the original paper--basically like turnitin.com failing him.

And he still graduated!

I appreciate the offer, but I'm hopefully only temporarily unemployed and live enough of a spartan life that I could be unemployed for at least a year before worrying too much about money.

Who is Haim Brezis?

test post ... what is my anonymous id?

This actually happened.
>be math undergrad
>talking with one of my professors because we're buddies like in the pasta
>"glad you took this course because I'm leaving to Ohio to get my PhD next semester"
>"that's great, what's your PhD going to be on?"
>"oh, the same, math"

what do you do for a living

A goofy looking guy who works at Rutgers? I've never heard of him.

Nothing? Isn't that what it means to be unemployed?

Any tips for someone going into their first year of mathematics undergrad soon? Have you tried applied math, and what would you say the advantages of applied v. pure math are? I'm pretty interested in cryptography, but I'm not sure if I should do CSe/EE instead(outside of >le epic engineer maymay). Anys suggestions for cryptography I guess? I just don't want to be a shit programmer

What are my chances of getting into a top 20 for a masters in mathematics if my starting undergrad is sub 100? I plan on transferring to a different university.

If you do pure math, do it with something else, too. I took a few applied math courses, but never really got into the weeds. By the time I was a 3rd year pure math student the applied math graduate classes were either way too easy or way too computational to be interesting.

I'm not sure where cryptography is theoretically now. I know there's a lot about elliptic curves and algebraic geometry, but as always, it's a more computational thing--and algebraic geometers like to take credit for everything anyway.

We used to joke that applied math was also known as "funded math". Statistics even more so.

If you do pure math, do it because you enjoy it substantially more than stats or applied math. Don't do it because it's harder--it is, but that superiority complex won't help you get a good job. Forget all about those stupid tier lists, they don't matter to anyone but edgy people on Veeky Forums.

Thanks, are there any recommendations outside of the basics that Veeky Forums gives for undergrads(office hours, read book,, study)? How hard would you say it is to do any substantial research, or good internships as an undergrad? What is research math like at the top 20? Were you always at a top 20, or did you go somewhere lower ranked for undergrad?

If you're in Europe I can't help because I don't know much about the system there. For the United States and pure math you def. shouldn't apply to a master's program, because they're functionally useless and you'd be paying for it. PhD's are fully funded and you can always just leave with the master's regardless. (I got mine after 9 months in my program).

That said I went to a no-name private liberal arts school and did OK with admissions, but I did everything I could to stand out--I tutored, I did summer research, I took every math class my uni offered, I scored on the putnam, etc.

What was your GPA like in undergrad? Also, Thanks a lot for answering my questions. How hard is a PhD in Pure math to get? Is the level of uselessness the same for a masters in Applied math?

I think all that's reasonable advice. I lived in office hours for a few courses as an undergrad.

I went to a no name liberal arts school for undergrad, so it's not a huge deal if you have good grades and good coursework.

Doing research as an undergrad IN MATH is pretty rough, but because other sciences have lots of grunt work it's easier. I double majored in physics and did research in that and I think it still helped my math applications.

Another thing is that summer research for undergrads is also a ton of fun, since you work during the day and drink/party/play wow constantly the rest of the time.

It's hard to do substantial research anywhere. I can't compare it to a different experience though, because I never had one. We had a lot of camaraderie though but even with that research is a daunting, solo task that will suck your soul out.

What is the difference between regular research and smmer research? What do you actually do for either? What did you have to go through to get your PhD? Any regrets about it?

I don't know about Masters in applied math. My guess is that you'd be pretty employable if you graduated with good coding skills.

I graduated summa cum laude, so something like 3.9. I had trouble with some of the common curriculum courses (like english lit) but my in-major GPA's were essentially perfect (I think I got an A- in multi because I turned in no homework, and optical physics was the bane of my existance).

How hard is it? I usually muse that they give PhD's to anyone, but that's probably not true. I think anyone who really wants to and has a smidgen of talent could pass qualifying exams at any top 20 university. Getting past whatever candidacy requirements there are after that might be a bit harder, but I've seen some thoroughly average people do it.

But again. Don't think that because a PhD in math is hard it's better than anything else. Only do it if you literally cannot see yourself doing something more practical and enjoying it even close to as much.

When you're an undergraduate research can be a super mixed bag depending on who your adviser is. For hard sciences it's a lot of pipeting, pretty often. I think that actual research during the year as an undergrad is essentially the same but with less of a time commitment.

Math research is probably different depending on who you are. For me, after I passed all the exams, my adviser gave me a problem to work on--it was something he thought was easy that ended up being much more difficult (and interesting) than he thought, but the problem statement was simple enough to understand.

First step is to learn what's been done. That's reading a lot of papers.

Next you try to think things through with the naive ideas you have. It never works, because if it did, it wouldn't be good enough to be a research problem.

Then you read some more papers and learn some other methods and try to stitch together some ideas of your own with some of the developed methods to get something.

Obviously the last step is the hardest. As you're doing that, ostensibly you come up against other problems to think about that you could work on once you solved the initial one.

Honestly that sounds pretty cool. What were the qualifying exams like? What was the range of schools you applied to, for both grad and undergrad?

Should I stick with math or lobotomize myself and get a CS degree?

Also, what was your general schedule like during your PhD? What other commitments were you expected to keep outside of research and writing your thesis?

Phew. To get my PhD I had to pass a bunch of tests, do a bunch of coursework and then write a thesis.

My thesis was essentially two papers I'd written thrown together with an introduction trying to make it seem like they were related (they weren't).

I *absolutely* have regrets. I'm super jaded on academia and the way academic research is done now and what gets funded and what doesn't etc. I also don't like academic politics and the like.

But take it with a grain of salt. I'm unemployed because I'm super burnt out, which just happens to a lot of people. It's not some failure of the system, really. I had good job offers for non-academic and academic positions when I graduated, and I took one that I thought would still be interesting and research and I was supremely unhappy.

But my biggest regret is really, really simple: I was driven to mathematics because I was good at and it was hard. It gave me an ability to feel superior over others that I was studying something pure and daunting and they weren't. But in the end that hurt me. I studied abstruse analysis because it was the hardest subtype available in my department and didn't even consider applied math or stats even though they could have been just as fun and are certainly more pragmatic.

Yeah it sounds great, but it can be super frustrating when you go home and have accomplished basically nothing at the end of the day. On a good day, you struggled through a page and a half of a dense annals paper and still don't have any idea what it means or how it could be relevant to your research. Of course there are days where you make break throughs and that's amazing, but it's super duper rare if you're not a savant.

Qualifying exams were pretty simple. If you go to basically any top 20 school's math department website they have some example exams posted you can look over.

Why does everyone hate on CS here? It's super interesting stuff! If I could go back I'd probably still major in math but I'd absolutely swap my double to CS.

If you have an industry job in math and you're not a high school teacher you're going to be coding pretty regularly no matter what.

surely you should be able to move into stats or something applied like machine learning or OR through a post-doc or some shit if you're really good at analysis?

What non academic jobs were you offered? I really love learning, and research sounds like it would be pretty cool, but industry seems much more viable. Also how did the people who got PhDs in applied mathematics do after defending their dissertation?

Depended on what year I was in. I took 5 years to graduate but probably should have left in 4, so my last year was a lot of learning coding and self directed non-math personal development.

First year or so you take a bunch of courses to get you to the level of PhD candidate. Some combination of analysis algebra and topology depending on where you are. This is all breadth stuff so you can actually talk to other mathematicians.

Then you'll have some kind of exams and you'll pick a specialty and work with someone learning that specialty. Then you'll have some kind of other exam to get to candidacy and you'll start doing research.

A lot of people still take a small number of courses far into their program just to keep learning math and being involved with the department. There will also be endless seminars that you have to go to and listen to academics drone on about research even though they're often terrible speakers who lose the whole audience (except the faculty member they're actually trying to impress) within the first five minutes.

The whole time you'll have teaching duties. If you're lucky you'll just be a TA, which usually means a recitation (once a week, at night if you're unlucky) and grading exams 3/4 times a semester (and finals! So don't think you're going home before Christmas eve!). If you're not lucky you'll be instructor of record for a service course, which can be a ton of fun but murders your time.

In theory. Most post-docs expect you to hit the ground running and have your own research agenda--it's expected that you'll be in the same field and it would be super duper hard to not do that.

I actually got an interdisciplinary postdoc in bioinformatics that would'e been pretty similar to what you're describing, but I was also battling some super bad depression and burn out and had to drop out of it not long ago.

My institution also had a top 20 applied math department, but I only knew a few people there. I know two got pretty prestigious post docs, one who left with a master's works for an evil company in Madison, WI that writes in MUMPS and shouldn't be named, and a few in other areas of data science.

I wouldn't go to get a PhD with the intention of working in industry because it's a lot more time spent than is really necessary to get the skills needed to have a good career in industry. That said lots of companies like to hire PhD's, so maybe I'm talking out of my ass.

I had an offer from a private high school, a financial math position at an energy company, a software development position and the post-doc that I took.

>writes in MUMPS
What do you mean?

What would you recommend? Industry/gov't for cryptography seems pretty neat. But idk, same thing goes for learning topology at the graduate level.

Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System

It's an awful programming language. As an example, it has no order of operations, it just does things left to right:

10+5*2

Would give 30. Yeah.

The company's name starts with an "E" and ends with "pic"

i hope things get better man! i imagine it would be super easy to drop out of something like that, especially if you were super drained from finishing your phd and didn't get enough time to recover or something like that. i hope you feel better!

They're both interesting, perhaps even equally.

The thing is, one of the those things is way more likely to be able to get you a good job without having to take two postdocs, move to rural Pennsylvania and compete against the smartest people you'll ever meet.

If learning topology at a graduate level is the only way you can be happy, then you should absolutely go to graduate school for math. If you can conceive of other things you could study that are more practical and would interest you just as much, you should seriously consider those instead.

That sounds cancerous. What makes the company so evil?

Lol, however appealing working against fields medalists in cletusville sounds, applied math is equally interesting to me.

There's been plenty written about it online that I'll just leave it at that. Epic treats its workers pretty poorly and hires recent graduates so that it can get away with it. That combined with that it uses archaic languages makes it a pretty bad deal, but it's also a bit of a cult.

But don't take my word for it, there's lots of people with more knowledge than me about how terrible it is.

Thanks for answering my questions man, I hope you do well. You seem like you are pretty smart, so you'll probably be fine.

lol i got dinged from epic my senior year in undergrad... later found out how fortunate this was

I'm in a math PhD program right now, and I'm trying to work with a professor who works in topological data analysis. This professor is the only true applied math professor here, everyone else is effectively pure. That said, I don't know if I'll like it, as I really have not been into anything, as I still need to pass my quals. If it's not him , then I will probably work with someone else doing low dimensional topology, which is more of my mathematical interests. How do you choose the right advisor?

>pretty good base to start learning computer science
math degrees and computer science degrees are very different.

dont treat computer science as a backup if math doesnt work out

Your viewpoint is really interesting and I believe I would have ended up in a similar situation, if I didn't pull out after I graduated with my master's degree. I managed to land a job with the little programming experience I picked up in undergrad, so I'm all good. Since then I wondered if I made the right decision, because I feel I am wasting my talent. But reading your text gives me some hope that it was the right decision.

Don't lose hope my man. Have you considered consultant jobs? The hours are terrible, but they eem to emply alot of "stranded" mathematicians?

Why don't you learn programming and become a quant? Investment banks hire math and physics guys all the time, and the "300k starting" is not just a meme

ITT: non-ivy league brainlets who won't find work.

>tfw brainlet university and not even in the top there
c-can I have a PhD t-too?

What general advice would you give to a brainlet?

Don'r do Math, CS is the go to brainlet field

Thats pretty light, the amounts of protein and fat isn't too bad, i mean it is just pasta thats the heaviest.

Just make sure to drink more juices, or fibre rich foods like papayas and bananas, yoghurt also helps alot, failing that, there are also constipation pills, but you'll need to drink alot of water for it.

Do you ever think about killing yourself?
I'm in my 2nd year of CS undergrad.
It's not an impressive school.
My biggest fear is that i'll graduate, not find work, and there will be nothing left to do but reach for my gun and end it.

>2nd year of CS
better graduate with at least 4 internships or ur going to have absolutely no chance of competing with ahmed and punjetka on their lottery visas.

>tfw pharmacy school
>Saturated to high hell
>too deep in and my parents would be very ashamed that their son isn't a "doktur"
No im not chink or pajeet.
Is life good in austin, texas? The job market doesn't seem as bad there