{"id":1583,"date":"2011-04-01T11:58:36","date_gmt":"2011-04-01T15:58:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathgradblog.williams.edu\/?p=1583"},"modified":"2013-03-22T17:38:11","modified_gmt":"2013-03-22T17:38:11","slug":"if-grad-school-is-not-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/2011\/04\/01\/if-grad-school-is-not-for-you\/","title":{"rendered":"If grad school is not for you…"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Diana Davis<\/a>
\nI absolutely love being a math graduate student. I can’t imagine a better job — they pay me to take math courses, teach calculus to motivated college students, and think about interesting cutting-edge research problems! What could be better than that? <\/p>\n

As it turns out, though, not every math grad student is as happy as I am. As a recent Harvard Crimson article<\/a> discussed, it’s possible to be extremely unhappy in even the most renowned of educational institutions. If you don’t want to be a math grad student, that’s okay. Plenty of people leave math grad school and go on to do great things. In my program and others, people have:
\n
\n– left a math PhD program to enter an economics PhD program
\n– moved across the country to join the circus
\n– left academia to simply get a job<\/p>\n

When I was an undergrad at Williams, 10% of each class graduated as math majors (often as double majors) — a huge percentage. Only a handful of the math majors went on to pursue a math PhD each year; the rest did other things. That’s perfect, because once you have a math education, the analytical and creative skills you’ve acquired will help you in whatever field you pursue — teaching, business, government, science, art. All of these fields will benefit from your skills, and you’ll benefit from really enjoying your job.<\/p>\n

So if you love math grad school like I do — great! And if you don’t, that’s okay! There are plenty of other opportunities out there in the world where your skills are sorely needed.<\/p>\n

What other examples do you know of, where students have left a math PhD program and gone on to do other things?<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Diana Davis I absolutely love being a math graduate student. I can’t imagine a better job — they pay me to take math courses, teach calculus to motivated college students, and think about interesting cutting-edge research problems! What could … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3gbww-px","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1583"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22251,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1583\/revisions\/22251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/mathgradblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}