What Is the Contribution of Mathematics to Graduates’ Professional Working Life?

Abstract

In this chapter we 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. 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 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. This seems to be a key characteristic of mathematics from the viewpoint of mathematicians and mathematics educators, as well as from students and recent graduates. We explore in detail their experience of mathematics as problem solving and the way this links with their view of their professional role as mathematicians. The result is a hierarchy of conceptions of the notion of problem solving in the context of the professional life of mathematical scientists.