If you have a maths degree can I ask you about it?

[Cathpot]

My DD has just been rejected from maths at Oxford post interview and is taking it really hard- much harder than I was expecting.

We have a lot to unpick about this but on a practical level I realised that she hadn’t really thought past the maths degree itself , just that she likes maths and people tell her it is a useful degree.. she was aiming for maths at Oxford and then presumed life would sort itself out from there.

She has offers from Edinburgh/ York /Bath and is waiting to hear from Warwick if anyone has direct experience of those unis? . I’m hoping to help her put this all into a perspective over the next few weeks - info about your experience of maths as a degree and then what it lead to would be really helpful . She is state school educated in a rural part of the country so we have zero contact with big finance companies etc and I don’t really know enough to talk confidentially about what uni/ work in the maths sphere might look like.

My son is at Warwick doing maths. He is having an amazing time. The course is challenging but he is loving the challenge. He works incredibly hard but is also exploring all the opportunities the clubs and societies have to offer.

His teacher said that Warwick was an excellent choice for maths.

My friend's son has recently graduated from Warwick and is now studying to be an actuary. My son has talked about that as a possible career.

Haven’t got a maths degree personally but my DC very much in same boat as yours (state school, small rural town, interview for maths at C but think chances of offer slim) and they also really like Warwick so I’ve been following them and their maths dept on socials and having a look at the course.

An advantage I see for Warwick is students can take a range of courses eg economics, stats, even languages as part of the maths degree so DC can explore other options. Plus a year out is possible iirc.

From the social media presence there also seems to be a load of companies and professional organisations visiting to hold sessions on various career paths. No doubt other unis offer this as well, but I can see a regular churn of these events at Warwick which I think would be hugely useful for students.

GL and am sure she will end up somewhere brilliant.

@Justlurkingmostly yes, my son is studying French as an optional module whilst doing his maths degree at Warwick. He is thinking about a year abroad as part of the degree.

From what he says there is also lots of accommodation at Warwick in halls and also in the local area.

Thank you so much for all these positive messages, experiences and and ideas ! Was lovely to come home to. Also she was baking a cake when I got in and not mooning around so I’m taking that as a good sign and avoiding all talk of unis this evening. Other than really feeling for her disappointment- I’m not sad about her missing out on Oxford as I had my reservations about how much fun she would have there compared to other unis, and she needs get out and live a bit. She has yet to come round to that silver lining argument!

She chose maths/ FM English and classics for A level because what she really loves is pure maths and then the other two were things she enjoys. She’s not wild about statistics but is comfortable with it so there is that. Her sister is at Edinburgh and loving it so that is part of the appeal there . I do think Warwick would be great and she went to the open day there which she was positive about. On paper she has the grades Warwick needs I think- but they’ve not released the TMUA cut off yet and they have changed the grading scale this year so we can’t count on an offer from them. I don’t want to lean into that in case it goes pear shaped. Anyway - lots of good news I can pick out of this thread to show her.

I am also a research scientist in a numerical field. Some of the people in my uni who are nominally in Maths do things like work out which type of therapy produces better results, how ecosystems balance, how and why people lie, how AI works and a bunch of other stuff.

Also thanks @Christwosheds for the video link I will watch that later.

I did maths, after getting 95%+ in my two maths A levels. I did not enjoy it at all. I didn't think about a career much just that I was good at maths and was sure there would be plenty of jobs for a maths graduate.

There are plenty of jobs for a maths graduate but few of them will only take maths degrees - they'd also take stats, maths with business, accountancy, operational research, economics, astronomy, physics etc. And I think all of those would have been much more interesting than my maths degree.

When I graduated I could choose between getting a BA or a BSc, that's how theoretical a maths degree is so unless your dd really enjoys the theoretical side and wants to do such a job (mainly academic) I'd suggest she gives more thought to what she actually wants to do and does a more practical degree with a heavy maths element.

I know 2 people with maths degrees, both women, both from state schools and went to RG universities. One is now a FD of a large international company, the other is a senior partner of a large accountancy firm.
Both love their jobs and make mega bucks.

Need to be a bit careful here. At a-levels I vastly preferred pure, to the extent I considered a just pure degree.
Arriving at uni I found the pure was so different from A-levels, I never really got to grips with it.
But I found actually I was really good at mechanics to the point I got nearly 100% on one of the mechanics papers-nearly half my score over 9 papers.

Maths can go almost anywhere. There's the obvious like accounting, but dh's firm prefer a maths grad to computing graduate for their programmers.

DC did maths and stats at Warwick (MORSE degree) which people often head into actuarial studies after. They loved it (also rejected by Oxford but realised that Warwick was a more suited to them degree). 10 years out now, director level in a national company and earning around £150k per annum. And very happy. Degree was tough (housemates said they did most studying in the house) but they loved it. Friends DS also did this degree and went on to be an actuary in the city and loves that too.

@Cathpot Did your DD make a decision about where she wants to go in the end?
I work with 11 colleagues in a maths dept, 5 of us have Warwick maths degrees, 2 Oxbridge, a Bath and the rest Mech Eng from RG unis. Anecdotally the Warwick gang had the best uni experiences (great campus, central location, cheaper cost of living) but the Mech Eng crew enjoyed the degree more.

My dd did a maths masters at Warwick. She went there from an average state school not knowing what she wanted to be.

She decided half way through to become a teacher and is now high up in a secondary school.

I did maths at a RG uni (not one you listed, but they are excellent options) and didn't get into Cambridge and didn't have a clue what I wanted to do afterwards. That's ok! It's totally fine not to know and maths opens a lot of options so DD doesn't have to have a plan.
Hannah Fry has a video where she mentions disappointment at not going to Cambridge, but now is a professor there, so that might help.
As for careers, your DD should just keep her eyes and ears open for opportunities on the way and open units in other topics can help find a niche. I wish I had done more in Cryptography as I loved it, but found uni bloody hard and lonely (on the studying side) as everything was in big groups with minimal interaction on my course.

@FreshAirForwards
hi- thanks for checking in. She got an offer from Warwick and we went back up to the offer holder day to have another look . The maths students were lovely, very welcoming and positive. Also the flexibility of the modules she can take is appealing . We stayed in leamington spa and had a nice evening there. Also had an afternoon being tourists in Stratford . So Warwick is her first choice- obviously it’s a high offer. Then second choice is York based on the fact she really likes the town , offer is ABC which gives her a plan B . I know she is still carrying the disappointment which I get but definitely in a different place than a few months back. Thank you for all the messages, I appreciate it - just A levels to get through now!

Sadly of no relevance for your DD, but Catholic boys with a UG Maths degree now have a new career option: Pope 😀

Ha!

My degree is in economics, but I work with many statisticians. They are very helpful because while my maths skills are strong, they are the experts. We do research. The statisticians often get tasks like weighting samples for non-respondents.

I have just bern informed by DH that the new President of Romania, the centrist Nicursor (sp?) Dan, has a PhD in maths from the Sorbonne.

Seems the field is a great credential for some high powered jobs

My DS1 was also very sad not to get in to Oxford to study Maths after interviews in December. He did get early offers from Manchester, Warwick and York - I'm not sure if he's ever heard from St Andrews. He dithered a bit between Manchester and Warwick but now seems to have chosen Manchester as his firm choice. I think he would probably have had a great time in Oxford but that he will also enjoy Manchester, and one of his friends, also turned down by Oxford for Physics, is also hoping to head there.

Good luck to your DD for Warwick.

My grad year (not in the uk) have variously gone to logistics and modelling eg train networks, big construction firms, management consulting like Bain, bcg, more maths so local and also places like Cambridge and Columbia, banking and finance of course - a range of data analysis and more investment banking, I went into alternative investments then risk modelling, other deep modelling fields such as load forecasting in electricity networks. Highly recommend maths 😊😊

My son went to a state school, did an internship at KPMG, gained a masters in maths from Oxford and is now an actuary. Has your DD considered Durham?

Relative of mine is doing maths at Cambridge. Has been head hunted by one of the big investment fund companies for an internship. Paid a crazy amount of money (more than my annual salary) for an internship in the summer. If they take up a job after finishing their degree starting salary is over 200k.

warwick is a great uni, tell her to look up/apply for intern positions. My relative was head hunted like I said but i think they take 100 on each summer…not sure if companies also advertise as well as head hunt. Be worth looking on various companies websites.

I did maths at an ex poly uni and everyone in my cohort has decent jobs in various fields. A few did a one year masters (including myself but it was fully funded), but many went on to graduate schemes etc or straight into decent jobs. Off the top of my head- teaching, tech, supply chain, data etc. I was worried about it not being a specific enough degree, but employers its highly regarded across a lot of sectors, including ones which will continue to expand such as computing.

My cousin with a maths degree from Cambridge and now an employer advised ds that he thought the maths teaching was best of all at Warwick.

Slightly off on a tangent, but if OP's DD is planning on some kind of financial career (banks, accounting, financial services etc), then rather than a general Maths degree, some Unis (Leeds, Lancaster etc) do a Financial Maths degree with doesn't have the mechanics/geometrics side of Maths, but instead includes accounting, economics and business modules, but is still heavily loaded to probability, statistics, proofs, etc. So can a better fit for students with no intention of becoming engineers, academics, etc., and is more "work" related. Most still remain BSC courses (rather than some that are BA) due to their heavy weighting of Maths - from memory, my son's was something like 65% Maths dept and 35% business/economics dept. Another good thing about that is that the economics and accounting modules can usually be used to claim exemptions in professional exams, such as accountancy and actuarial if the student moves on to such professional exams in their future careers - my son got three exemptions from his actuarial exams which knocks a year off his professional exams study length!

DS was actually against a Maths degree (despite it being his best subject, A* at A level and Further Maths) as he didn't actually like the geometry, mechanics side of it but loved statistics, algebra and probability, so it was only him discovering that Financial Maths degrees existed that he went down that route as it really wasn't what he was aspiring to do at Uni as he was quite put off by Further Maths at school!