Posted on 01/09/2009 5:47:48 PM PST by rabscuttle385
Mathematicians Land Top Spot in New Ranking of Best and Worst Occupations in the U.S.
BY SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN
The Wall Street Journal
Nineteen years ago, Jennifer Courter set out on a career path that has since provided her with a steady stream of lucrative, low-stress jobs. Now, her occupation — mathematician — has landed at the top spot on a new study ranking the best and worst jobs in the U.S.
"It's a lot more than just some boring subject that everybody has to take in school," says Ms. Courter, a research mathematician at mental images Inc., a maker of 3D-visualization software in San Francisco. "It's the science of problem-solving."
The study, released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress. (CareerCast.com is published by Adicio Inc., in which Wall Street Journal owner News Corp. holds a minority stake.)
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
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Too bad that the Socialist nanny staters systematically dismantled U.S. educational institutions to the point where the majority of students in graduate-level technical programs such as the physical and applied sciences and engineering are...foreigners or children of foreigners. |
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I knew a constipated mathematician, at one time.
He had to work it out with a pencil.
LOL!!!
When I was younger (back in college), I heard that actuaries had the best job satisfaction with the balance of earnings and stress and workload, but I thought accountants were boring. Ironically, years later, I worked at a Big 8 (6, 5) Accounting firm as a computer programmer, in a stress-filled position.
Want a real job? Do 5 years in the Army, then get a degree in math.
You will never be unemployed again.
According to YAHOO today, these are the best jobs to get into now:
1. Restructuring Officers
2. Turnaround Experts
3. Distressed Asset Managers
4. Bankruptcy Attorneys
5. Financial Analysts
6. Budget Analysts
No joke. Says something about what is in store for this country.
Physicists defer only to mathematicians.
Mathematicians defer only to God.
Mathematics is the language with which God has written the Universe.
Galileo Galilei
Absolutely!
As a graduate student with a masters in mathematics who will be starting a PhD in the fall I can tell you this article is misleading.
They should make a clear that because something is a “great job” it doesn’t mean that it is a great or even good career path for most people. Being a top-ten pro golfer is also a great job but not everyone can do it or can wind up in that position.
Sure, being a tenured professor or an established mathematician is nice work but is it, among other things, worth an extra five or six more years of hard schooling and stress?
And even then you need the ability to earn tenure by writing good papers in things like operator theory or algebraic topology. Believe me it’s not “low-stress” (at least not for the normal human being) thinking about such things all day. And college teaching is increasingly like high-school teaching with herds of disinterested, barely literate students keeping the seats warm in calculus classes.
I could have been an engineer, or chemist, or accountant and be making more than I expect to earn another three or four years from now IF I can find a decent job at a university or in research (it is insanely competitive for those jobs right now).
How the heck did ‘parole officer’ make it near the top of the list?
And who do you think God calls when His network crashes?
You owe me a new keyboard!
Math is an imaginary thinking tool. The real world can only be approximated using mathematics. Let me know when mathematicians can compute tomorrow's weather.
Disintested means objective --you mean UNinterested.
3 > 2 (except for unusually large values of 2).
Cheers!
Like, *PING*, dude.
I already knew math was a great career.
Or unusually small values of 3.
That’s correct! Hoist by my own petard, I suppose (or is it hoisted?).
Without engineers, we’d be living in caves digging for grubs with a stick.
Without mathmaticians, we wouldn’t know how long the grubs are.
: )
Hamlet:
There's letters seal’d, and my two schoolfellows,
Whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d—
They bear the mandate, they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work;
For ‘tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard, an’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon.
Hamlet Act 3, scene 4, 202–209
“Hoist with his own petard” literally means “blown up with his own mine.”
More generally, a “petard” is a hat-shaped device
which can be be charged with gunpowder.
Just doin' muh job.
Accountants are boring, but I’d rather interact with them than have the of job parole officer—14th best on the list?
It is frightening that “sociologist” is so high on the list, given that the primary employer of sociologists is Government.
...Eric Nellans, who has been cutting timber for the past 11 years for Pike Lumber, is passionate about his profession. "It's a very rewarding job, especially at the end of the day when you see the work you accomplished," he says.
Some truths are eternal:
"People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results." —Albert Einstein
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