Failing to inspire

[purplecat]

I'm supposed to be giving a talk to misc year 10 and 11 maths students (that's O' level students, I think, to us ancient types) on mathematical careers in academia.

I have half an hour and I've been asked to cover: "career path, qualifications, University life, experiences, Job Spec, potential salary (the pupils always seems to ask how much people earn!)"

I think I have just written 10 of the dullest slides I have ever produced. My will to live saps just glancing over them, and I have 4 more slides than I have any right to for a half hour talk. I am also torn between wanting to stress that you should only consider a career in academia if you really want to know more about your subject, and wanting to bang the "study mathematics" drum.

But really, is anyone going to be inspired to study maths because I tell them I once worked on a project called "Proof and Specification Assisted Design Environments", that all these jobs want you to have a PhD, excellent communication skills and the ability to self-motivate research and that the pay scale at the bottom starts in the low £20,000 per annum and goes up to who knows what because Professors negotiate their own salaries.

Or should I ignore the teacher's request and just waffle about satellites and orbital debris?

Advice much appreciated, especially advice on what it would be useful and interesting for me (as an academic with a maths background) to tell some teenagers...

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/21026.html.

Comments

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I'd be tempted to just ditch the slides and talk. That's what I usually do.

They will want to know about salary, but my experience is that even older teenagers don't really appreciate what £20,000 / £30,000 / £50,000 means. I would talk about salary in terms of lifestyle (e.g. where do you live / in what size of house / what car do you drive / where do you go on holiday).

Half an hour isn't actually very long. I'd budget to talk for twenty minutes, leaving ten minutes to ask for questions. That assumes this is a talk to people who have expressed an interest in this career. If this is a talk to a general group, they'll probably have fewer questions.

Something that I often get at accountancy talks is that your stereotypical nerd doing maths, physics and further maths A-levels comes up to me and tells me that he wants to be an accountant because he "really enjoys maths". They're always disappointed when I tell them that accountancy rarely involves any maths of even GCSE standard and that if they really wanted to be an accountant, doing something like Business Studies, Economics or even anything where you have to occasionally write sentences would have been a good idea. You could therefore offer maths academia as a career where "enjoying maths" is actually vital and where the maths is more mathematically interesting than monetary unit sampling and discount rates.

[purplecat]

Writing the slides is more a planning tool than anything else, but I'm going to need at least one for the salary figures.

I think the talk is for all year 10 and year 11 who are doing maths GCSE which, I suspect, is all of 'em. So almost certainly fewer questions.