Originally Posted by
Campag4life
You will have to do some soul searching if you want to direct him toward math as a major for sure.
As a guy who worked in product engineering my whole life, I am very careful to recommend engineering to anybody with affinity for math and science.
My brother has a master's in physics from a top grad school and taught math for living and just retired early. I believe he would have chosen another path as well. Not easy to be an engineer or a teacher in America today.
I have to say it's great being a statistician. I taught at Emory U for a couple of years. My husband is a tenure track professor there in a different field. He's very stressed about funding and grants. So, I can't say I would recommend to my son to go the academia route. But, government or corporate routes for statisticians are good careers tracks. At least it's been good to me.
But I am surprised to hear that it's tough to be an engineer.
I can tell you that, as of right now...he's 12 and he wants to design top tier sports/super cars. So he wants to become an engineer. I cannot, in good conscience, dissuade him from that! It certainly seems sexy and it's definitely STEM. Perhaps it will grow more realistic as he gets older but I think its' a good goal for a 12 year old.