Transcript - Jonathan Adler

On finding good math jobs in
Industry
Dr. Jonathan D Adler
[email protected]
http://jadler.info
• What kind of jobs are actually out there for math
students?
• What jobs are actually enjoyable?
• Do I want to teach?
Questions
during your
undergrad
• What should I be doing now to get me those jobs?
• What classes should I be taking?
• What extracurriculars are important?
• So what’s the deal with internships anyway?
• Should I get a Masters? A PhD?
• Can I take time off before going back to school?
• Will this actually help me if I don’t want to be a
professor?
• Who should I be asking these questions to?
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Allow me to answer
your questions
By telling you my life story
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College:
Worcester
Polytechnic
Institute
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What kind of
jobs are
there for
math
students?
• I became a math major because I liked taking math
classes
• When I was an undergraduate in math I had no idea
what kinds of jobs I could get. I figured the breakdown
was:
1. High school math teacher
2. College math professor
3. Industry???
• Naturally, as someone who liked taking math classes, (2)
seemed like the natural choice for me.
• Decided to get a BS/MS so that I could then get a PhD
• Maybe more useful for industry I guess?
• Did my master’s thesis on graph theory and monadic
second order logic
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• Had an internship at BBN technologies
Might as well
test the
waters.
• Used partial differential equations to model how waves
propagate for sonar and other naval uses
• Made some cool MATLAB demos with waves propagating
• Had a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU)
• Tried for find exact solution for some time delay
differential equations
• Sat around staring at a piece of paper hoping to simplify
some really really tricky equations
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• If being a math professor means doing a lot of trying to
find exact solutions and coming up fruitless, maybe it
wasn’t right for me.
Maybe being
a professor
wasn’t right
for me
• My internship was fun! I solved problems, and wrote
code people could use! Maybe industry would be right
for me.
• I had a few more internships:
• Did a project with the BOSE Corporation numerically
modeling screw insertion into plastic
• Worked at Boeing making mathematical forecasts of how
aircraft demand would change in the near future
• It felt like math
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• When searching for my first job, there were zero nonteaching jobs labelled “mathematician”
Finished
school, time
to find a job
• Lots of jobs would take math majors
• “If they’re hiring math majors, that must mean I’ll be
doing math! Let’s see how it goes!”
• Ended up getting a job at a company called Vistaprint
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• I was able to get a job because I had internships
• Employers want to know an employee can handle a work
environment
• Fundamentally different than “A+ student”
Tip 1:
“Tall oaks
from little
acorns grow”
• I was able to get internships because I had other
internships
• I also talked to professors, friends, family, anyone
• Getting the first one is the hardest
• Doesn’t have to be an “internship”
•
•
•
•
Class project experience
Research with a professor
Fun project (ex: kaggle.com)
Particularly project based extracurriculars (ex: game
development club)
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First real job:
Vistaprint
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• Vistaprint sells custom printed business cards online
Vistaprint
• Referred by a friend (hiring math majors!)
• Job description: maintain the statistical models used to
forecast the business
• What that meant…
• Press the button in SAS once a month that spits out the
forecast.
• Paste the results into excel and make charts
• Paste the charts into PowerPoint.
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“Math” work
Proving theorems
Every math undergrad thinks
they will end up here
Developing new methods
Tip 2:
Difference
between
“Math” and
“mathy”
Finding new applications for existing methods
Using existing methods in conventional ways
“mathy” work
Vistaprint job
(as hired)
Manipulating data in interesting ways
Interesting jobs for
math grad students
fall here
Interesting jobs for math
undergrads fall here
Manipulating data in Excel
Manipulating charts in PowerPoint
most jobs for math
undergrads fall here
Pressing the button that needs to be pressed
Office work
Going to meetings
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Job titles
“Math” work
Tip 2:
Difference
between
“Math” and
“mathy”
“mathy” work
Proving theorems
Researcher
Developing new methods
Scientist
Machine learning expert/
Finding new applications for existing methods Senior data scientist/
Statistician/
Using existing methods in conventional ways Operations researcher/
Advanced analytics expert
Manipulating data in interesting ways
Manipulating data in Excel
Manipulating charts in PowerPoint
Analytics / Data Science
Analyst
Pressing the button that needs to be pressed
Office work
Going to meetings
Business analyst
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• Nothing “wrong” with being lower on the ladder
Tip 2:
Difference
between
“Math” and
“mathy”
• Just because it isn’t “Math” doesn’t mean it isn’t
interesting and a good brain workout
• Way more jobs lower on the ladder
• Too high up and your stuff doesn’t get used
• Thinking all the time is exhausting
• You can move up the ladder
• Find a new area to do something mathematical
• Improve a current process with clever tricks
• Automate a process that is boring
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• Problem:
• Vistaprint had data on revenue for every order for the past few
years
• On a recent Tuesday had a bug which went undetected and
lowered sales dramatically
Tip 2:
Example
• A director emailed my department and asked for history of
sales over all Tuesdays, was going to take the average of that
and if you’re below it you can tell there is a bug
• Options:
a) Run a SQL query to get the data and email it to him
b) Point out it’s a much more complicated and interesting
problem
•
•
•
•
Sales are increasing over time
Only interested in sudden drops
How do you correctly determine how low is “too low?”
What if you want to detect it more quickly than that?
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• I was loud and complained we were doing things the wrong way, and
ultimately was put in charge of a team to create a system of
statistical quality control tools to detect anomalies
• Normalize the data:
• By day of week
• By time of year
• By if it is a holiday
Tip 2:
Example
(solution)
• Compare to recent few hours for sudden drops, previous week for
more long term decay. Use mean and standard deviation to detect
when an drop is sufficiently large
Daily sales volume in millions of dollars
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2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
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• To be decent in industry you need to know
• Basic databases (intro database course)
Tip 3:
Skills you
should get
before leaving
school
• Everyone stores their data in SQL (or equivalent)
• Since industry mathematics is all based on data, you need to be able to
manipulate it
• Basic programming (intro programming course)
• Don’t have to be a CS wizard, but do need to be able to understand loops,
functions, and the simple stuff
• Language isn’t a big deal (ex: MATLAB is okay), but need to be able to do
more than just run built in functions
• Basic statistics (intro statistics course)
• Everything has uncertainty
• Need to be able to understand how the uncertainty of the data will affect
your results
• Unfortunately assumptions from class never hold, so get really to roll with it
• Other knowledge will help (ex: linear programming)
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Tip 4:
Learn how to
learn
• To be excellent in industry you need
• Everything from the previous list
• The ability to learn more things
• Projects and internships are potentially great ways to
learn how to learn
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• By the time I left Vistaprint I was:
• Building new models for forecasting sales volumes using
much more advanced methodologies
Vistaprint
(continued)
• If you have the previous three years of sales volumes, how
can you predict what next year’s will be? By day?
• Leading a team to build a statistical quality control tool
for sales metrics
• Dabbling in recommendation engine to decide what
products to show to users of the site
• Given that you know a lot about the person visiting the
site, how can you decide what products to recommend to
them?
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Next real job:
Boeing
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• Boeing sells airplanes
• Worked in the market forecasting group: helped predict
number of airplanes the world would need in 20 years
Boeing
• Example problem: suppose you have historic data on
when aircraft were built and when they were scrapped;
how can you predict when airplanes that are currently
flying will be scrapped? Answer is affected by things like
economic downturns
• This is a statistical analysis, given you have an airplane and
you know it’s model and age, what is the probability it will
be scrapped in a particular year?
• Model and age are independent variables, predicting
scrapped probability
• We used a logistic regression ultimately
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• While job had some math, ultimately I fell lower on the
ladder
Boeing
• “I know what will help get me higher up that ladder!
More school!”
• Maybe I’ll realize I wanted to be a professor after all
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Grad school
2:
Arizona State
University
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• Went to get a PhD in Industrial Engineering
• Liked the operations research part of math, but that
wasn’t in the math department of ASU
• Conveniently also taught me statistics and data mining
Arizona State
University
• Researched routing policies for electric vehicles (graph
theory meets optimization meets transportation)
• Being an academic is:
• An extremely difficult job to get in the first place
• Wasn’t ultimately rewarding to me
• Academia: publish papers that move the field forward
slightly
• Industry: make models and tools that can help your one
particular company a lot
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• Many grad students worry that doing time in industry before
a PhD will make them be a weaker candidate
• “departments won’t want to accept you”
• “you’ll get too used to the money”
Grad school
and industry
do mix!
• But it’s a great idea
•
•
•
•
•
Teaches you how to work 40 hours a week
Lets you understand why you’re choosing to be there
You might like industry
You will be less broke in grad school
Industry teaches other skills
• Going from undergrad straight to a PhD can be really risky!
• If you don’t get a job in academia and you don’t have the lesson
3 skills and internships then it will be really hard to get a job in
industry
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• You can get internships during grad school!
Grad school
and industry
do mix!
•
•
•
•
A nice income supplement for grad students
An introduction to what industry is like
A break from research to let you get a fresh perspective
Essential if the student ends up going to industry
• Don’t be the professor who doesn’t let their student work
during the summer
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Next job:
Promontory
Growth and
Innovation
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Promontory
Growth and
Innovation
• PGI was a “management consulting” company, in that we
helped companies increase profitability
• I was a lead on the team that took client data and tried
to figure out what’s going on
• End up using a grab bag of mathematical techniques
•
•
•
•
Data mining
Bayesian statistics
Linear programming
Graph theory
• Pretty high up the “mathy” ladder yet still got to deliver
real value
• During the job I accidentally became a
• Software developer
• Project manager
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• A hospital has hourly staff, which work in different
departments and jobs (sometimes multiple)
Promontory
Growth and
Innovation
(Example
problem)
• The staff is taking a lot of overtime hours
• How much of that overtime is necessary?
• A matching problem:
• The departments and jobs have a demand that needs to
be filled
• The staff has a supply
• There is a bipartite graph between those two sets, and
the edges are if an employee can do that job
• A linear program can be solved to figure out how much
of the demand can be served before needing overtime
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• Graduate school can teach you how to learn on your
own
• Essential for jobs higher up the mathy ladder
Tip 5: grad
school only
sort of helps
• Grad school may teach you some of the three key skills
(statistics, databases, programming)
• An MS or PhD may open doors for some jobs higher up
on the mathy ladder
• A doctorate without experience is an even harder hire
• Has a huge opportunity cost if you’re not careful
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Today:
Microsoft
Studios
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• Microsoft makes lots of first party games: Halo,
Minecraft, Gears of War, etc.
• Each game creates data (player kills and deaths, times
logged in, in game purchases)
Microsoft
Studios
• That data can be used to:
• Prevent cheating
• Forecast sales of future games
• Improve the game itself
• Data from one game can be shared with others for a
better overall picture
• I am a member of the (just starting) shared analytics
across all titles
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Questions
during your
undergrad
(revisited)
• What kind of jobs are actually out there for math students?
• Teaching jobs – high school and small liberal arts professors
• Industry jobs – helping companies by using math on their data
• Research jobs – doing academic research to move the field forward
• What should I be doing now to get me those jobs?
• What classes should I be taking?
Stats, programming, databases, and some focused math classes
• What extracurriculars are important?
Anything that makes you well rounded, but especially project work
• So what’s the deal with internships anyway?
Get experience in being in a work environment so future employers can
trust you
• Should I get a Masters? A PhD?
Maybe, if having thought provoking work is important to you
• Can I take time off before going back to school?
Yes, and actually it’s great
• Will this actually help me if I don’t want to be a professor?
If you’re smart about it
• Who should I be asking these questions to?
People who have been down this road before. Ask your professors, they can put you
in contact with former students and people in industry
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Questions?
(For a copy of this presentation go to: http://jadler.info)
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