

Why You Should Choose Math in High School - dpapathanasiou
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i11_math.html

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ojbyrne
"Choose math because you will make more money."

I could rant at length, but instead I'll just quote Greenspun:

"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are
the lowest paid in the United States."
<http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science>

High school math starts you down that road. Other parts of his argument are
better.

~~~
hello_moto
With Math (and Statistics), you can choose many different jobs.

Economics Financial Analyst Engineers Statisticians (for govt) Computer
Science

Those young Wall Street-ers that score 6-7 figures income have strong Math
background.

I remember one of the commenters either here or in reddit said that according
to his experience as an MIT student majoring in CS/E, graduate either pursue
career in hi-tech or work at Wall Street as financial analyst.

Goldman-Sachs came to my school looking for engineers, CS and
math/statisticians. Morgan-Stanley hires engineer students from my school
instead of Business/Commerce. And these jobs aren't IT related.

~~~
aswanson
From a money standpoint you probably can't beat Wall Street. From a mental
stimulation standpoint it probably blows.

Most people who go into a technical major probably do so because they want to
create and learn. I don't think the majority who choose those types of (Wall
$reet) gigs initially came out of high school saying "I'm going into
theoretical physics and math to get a job on wall street". They just gave up
on the dream.

At any rate, if your goal is to make a lot of money, going to a top law school
probably has better average expected return than a similar caliber school
technical degree, with far less variance, as someone here has pointed out.

But I can't knock people for trying to get paid.

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jacobolus
"Students see math as hard, boring and irrelevant, and do not respond (at
least not sufficiently) to motivational factors such as easier admission to
higher education or interesting and important work."

In my opinion, this is almost wholly a function of broken curricula and
overworked, insufficiently experienced teachers. Learning mathematics by rote
is a) tremendously boring, and b) doesn't work.

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kirubakaran
Then why do they show all those public service commecials on TV:

"Math... DON'T DO IT... be above the influence..."?

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edw519
"Math is to learning what endurance and strength training is to sports: the
basis that enables you to excel in the specialty of your choice. You cannot
become a major sports star without being strong and having good cardiovascular
ability. You cannot become a star within your job or excel in your profession
unless you can think smart and critically -- and math will help you do that."

That's the best articulation of this idea I've ever seen.

The article could have (and should have) stopped after this.

~~~
daniel-cussen
I feel like learning math (and to a lesser extent, other hard sciences) is the
only certain way you can exercise your brain.

~~~
aswanson
What about art, creative writing, music, etc?

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manvsmachine
reminds me of when pg said that you can estimate the worth of a education
program by seeing how many people drop out to do something easier. I can't
think of anyone who's ever complained of having hard classes switching to
math/CS afterwards.

~~~
geebee
Unfortunately, this has happened to some extent with CS programs offered
through the math department. CS is so severely impacted at a lot of UCs, and a
lot of students (probably pretty good ones) are denied access to the major, so
some students look into doing an alternate CS-style major through the math
department. The reason I say "unfortunately" is that I think the students who
get bounced from CS but make it through math could have made it through CS if
there had been more resources for them. It's stupid to have people who really
want to be majoring in CS working through Real Analysis proofs that they don't
enjoy or even particularly care much about.

Some of this is just because math is a bit cheaper on the budget. A whiteboard
and a room is all you need for most math classes, so they tend to take most
people who want to give it a crack. It's pretty hard to get into an upper
division CS class as a non-major, because they barely have space for the
majors (again, I don't think this is the case at well funded private
universities with small undergrad populations like Stanford or MIT - it's more
of a problem at Berkeley and other large state-supported institutions). Maybe
it's also cultural within the field. If you go up to a math professor and ask
if you can join his class without the pre-reqs, he's more likely than a CS
professor to say "well, as long as you think you can handle it, sure." I
suspect math professors are just a bit more laid back than the CS ones.

But overall, I do agree with you - nobody drops out of a "hard" major to take
the "easier" classes in the math dept.

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smelendez
Who is going to read this and be influenced? I don't think many non-math-
interested high-schoolers read ACM publications.

