Mathematics professor skills for your resume and career

I believe there's a good possibility that the world will constantly change over the next few decades in ways that we cannot envision now. As a result, two very important soft skills are 1) adaptability and 2) learning new things independently. To strengthen the skill of adaptability, acquiring a broad background in math, computer science, data science, and statistics, and taking courses in science and business and even courses in the humanities would help. To build up the ability to learn new things independently, a person should read varied types of material, especially technical material and areas they are not familiar with. Other soft skills such as speaking, writing, and congeniality have always been important and will continue to be so.

Generally, all future mathematics jobs will involve computers in some way. Having skills with current, heavily used software and programming languages, such as SPSS and Python, is big to land that first job. For the future, knowing anything and everything about computers should be helpful: programming, cybersecurity, software engineering, database management, numerical approximation, etc. Data is becoming increasingly important, so statistical, data science, and database skills will be helpful.

I always regard a gap year as a complete and utter waste of time. You can find yourself and discover your inner strengths and resources by taking a job where you push yourself to be useful, make yourself indispensable. If you want to move to Spain and sleep all day, drink all night and discover, whoa, are you kidding me - are these people too? I won't stop you. But just when the vaccine does its thing, and the boomers finish retiring, lots of jobs are going to open up, and Mr. Gap Year has a year blank on the resume. Good luck with that.

I'm a boomer. I'd retire now if it hadn't been for 2008 and this past debacle. Now all us boomers have the following strategy: Do you KNOW you can make it on what you've saved and what you might get from Social Security (until 2034) and from investments? No? Then suck it up and work another year. I want to think we've postponed a demographic job-shift, which should still happen when us poor slobs can finally afford to retire.

Students studying mathematics learn how to break complex problems into smaller ones, solve those smaller problems, and then reassemble the solutions to unlock the larger challenges. Of course, as the world becomes increasingly data dependent, more and more types of companies and organizations will need quantitatively strong graduates: graduates that can work with large data sets, that can help visualize large data sets, and that understand how to apply various areas of mathematics to the data science world. Furthermore, undergraduates in mathematics typically gain computer-programming experience and a strong understanding of algorithmic thinking; a major understanding in how computers work and how to program them will continue to be desirable in the workforce as more and more operations are automated. Furthermore, a deeper understanding of mathematical ideas will be foundational to make technological breakthroughs.