Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Something from the "who'dda thunkit?" category:

Apparently, "mathematician is the best career in America right now", with a median income of over 90K. But really, don't take the word of a monk about how great the monastery is. Take it from the Karl Fendelander. In an article on Yahoo! hotjobs entitled

"The Hottest $40-an-Hour Careers"

Mathematician rates up there with Art Director, Geoscientist, Computer Software Engineer and Pharmacist. Go figure!!

Here is the relevant entry:

Mathematician

This career has numbers on its side. In their sweeping study of jobs in America, CareerCast [a job search portal] found that mathematicians are at the very top -- that's right, mathematician is the best career in America right now. Mathematicians are extremely satisfied with their jobs, happy with their lives, and, of course, don't mind that $40+ an hour.

A bachelor's degree get you started, but getting any further usually requires a post-graduate degree. From finance to physics, mathematicians find careers in any industry that deals with numbers.

Median Hourly Wage for Mathematicians in 2007: $43.72 ($90,930 yearly)

From an insider, to be honest, the career can cause awkward silences at cocktail parties ;-) .

But its an excellent lifestyle, rated as one of the lowest in stress, and we are in demand.

3 comments:

Chris Aldrich said...

Richard, It's great to see you posting again regularly here. I'm glad that someone at Hopkins is blogging about Math! You might also consider using http://twitter.com as a tool as well. I know that http://twitter.com/johnshopkins has a very large following and you could use it as a template to help evangelize Hopkins Mathematics as well as promote the blog here.

Keep up the excellent work!

Chris Aldrich
JHU '96

Richard Brown said...

Thanks, Chris. It's good to see that there is an audience.

I thought of using twitter. I wasn't sure of the utility value yet, so I have been delaying. At least here, some of my old posts are time-independent advice.

I'll check out the twitter environment again.

Cheers!

Anonymous said...

I received several offers in that range immediately after I graduated from JHU. I couldn't imagine a better job.