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Lessons from My Math Degree That Have Nothing to Do with Math
The unexpected upsides to studying numbers
Picture a mathematician. What do you see?
I’ll conjure up a popular image. It’s late at night. A figure is hunched over a desk scribbling into a notebook. The room smells like graphite dust, eraser shavings and body odor. Numbers and symbols gleam in the lamplight, and a calculator sits idle nearby towering textbooks.
It’s not an entirely unjust stereotype. Math attracts its fair share of cave dwellers. (I should know, since I had lecture with them.) So when people discover that I studied applied mathematics in college, I get why they might raise an eyebrow like I’m from a different species.
The truth is far less exotic: I chose to study math because I was good at it and thought quantitative skills would bolster my career prospects. As it turns out, I wasn’t very good at it. I got my ass kicked by Euler and eigenvalues alike. And although familiarity with statistics has proved marginally useful, I’ve never used 99 percent of the methods, proofs and theorems I painstakingly studied in my college courses.
There were so many moments that I wished I had picked a different major. Something easier. A little less painful. At times, I hated math. And yet, six years later, I’m…
