Becoming a Mathematician by Leigh N Wood Peter Petocz & Anna Reid

Author:Leigh N Wood, Peter Petocz & Anna Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

Introduction

We now change the focus of our investigations to students who have made the transition to becoming mathematicians. We report on aspects of two interview studies that we carried out with recent graduates from degrees in the mathematical sciences. We investigate the contribution that mathematics has made to their professional working lives and even to their personal lives. While many of them are working in a range of mathematical areas – including finance and banking, academia and research, business and IT, biostatistics and statistical forecasting – some of them are doing quite different work – for example, one of them is a police officer and another is a jazz musician (though since the interviews she has got a job as a lecturer in mathematics). Each of these graduates has successfully completed a degree in mathematics and is now qualified mathematically, even if they are not currently working with mathematics. The analysis of the interviews that we carried out with these graduates allows us to look back at the development of professional aspects of mathematics from the viewpoint of people who have made this transition. Their experiences and thoughts provide a significant viewpoint, and one that is vital in the investigation of becoming a mathematician. In this way, we extend our previous research where we focused on what students learn from undertaking a degree in mathematics, and what they take with them from their studies as they move into their workplace. Research in higher education rarely moves beyond the institutional learning situation, but here we explore what graduates have taken from their previous learning and how they interpret what they have learned in their new work contexts.

Recent mathematics graduates are in an intermediate position between students and professionals. On the one hand, their experiences as mathematics students are still fresh in their minds; on the other, they have started to develop an appreciation of the role that mathematics plays in their working life – and even those who are not working with mathematics can make comments about this. In our studies with graduates, we have found that they identify a range of outcomes from their mathematics education. These include the obvious technical skills in mathematics itself as well as more generic skills, the awareness of a range of personal characteristics such as self confidence and persistence, and the development of a professional identity. One notion that was expressed by almost all of the graduates was that studying mathematics has developed their ability to solve problems and think logically, although their interpretation of these terms was quite varied.

In this chapter we present recent graduates’ views of the contribution of mathematics to their professional life. We begin by identifying the range of technical, personal and professional skills that the graduates talked about, and illustrate them with quotations from the interviews. Then we narrow our focus to one specific aspect, a key characteristic of mathematics from the viewpoint of mathematicians and mathematics educators, as well as from students and recent graduates – the notion of problem solving.

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