Thinking of doing a maths degree - does anyone have any advice?

[Cromulent]

I'm seriously considering starting a maths degree in October and was wondering if anyone had any advice. Ultimately I'd like to get into game development and electrical engineering so I thought doing a maths degree would kill two birds with one stone.

What are the career prospects for maths degree graduates? I'm very much computer orientated.

 

[Cromulent]

Teacher as a last resort, financial, anything really, a chef. I did a bit of maths at uni, started off in honours level in first year but dropped down to maths for science students or something like that in second year. The honours stuff can be very abstract, almost philosophy. Really bizarre stuff at times, well that's how it would have seemed when your 18. I was lazy also at that age.

I did 3 years of this level of maths i.e non honours but still a bit tough at times.

It will train you to think, I don't know how much it crosses over with EE that's closer to Physics I think, been a while, over 20 years, and I've only tutored high school maths since so I forget.

The vast majority of maths graduates don't directly use their degree. If nothing else it's something to keep you busy but hard to advise.

Thanks for the info. I'm already an OK computer programmer so I feel that doing a maths degree will really help with theoretical computer science and electrical engineering. Both subjects that I am very interested in and then there is game development on top of that which I would like to pursue as a hobby.

You don't need a maths degree to get into electrical engineering or game development - a maths degree is much more in depth than that, and delves heavily into the theoretical side rather than practical.

Doing engineering myself, I've learned a lot of maths without it becoming too "thought based" - everything I've learned has been useful in a practical sense

Worth checking out the exact degree you're looking at though, at the university you want to go to

I want to the do the Maths BSc from the Open University.

This is the syllabus:

http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/qualifications/q31

Some decent maths wouldn't hurt for EE though - trust me I really struggled jumping in the deep end on that one, even with reasonable physics knowledge, and ended up dropping out. Engineering in general it isn't quite so needed but still a good idea to have a good grounding in maths. I do quite a bit of electronics as a hobby and some maths stuff can be quite a challenge when you are knee deep in the datasheet for a complex or sensitive component i.e. temperature coefficients, etc.

Game development though unless you are doing some really hardcore engine dev a maths degree is mostly a waste even AI generally you can get away with a far lesser understanding of maths (some areas aside) and for the most part it will only be some basic trigonometry and a bit of vector maths knowledge and if you are doing hardcore engine dev then you don't just need a maths degree you really need a pretty good head for that kind of stuff and comfortably able to work off the taught path with ease.

I do a fair bit of game development stuff as a hobby and for the most part it doesn't get much harder than the level of understanding to deal with dot products.

Yeah. When it comes to EE I want to concentrate on FPGAs and digital signal processing which are both very maths heavy. Plus the advantage of doing a maths degree is it has applications in an awful lot of fields.

 

[Cromulent]

Any reason you wouldn't go straight for Electrical & Electronic Engineering?. I studied EEE at Newcastle, during the first two years it was quite programming heavy - even though i opted for the "power engineering" route. A three year EE course plus a comp sci (this was popular with my colleagues at uni) should set you up well for either option.

I have mental health problems which make leaving the house hard, so I need to do a distance learning course, and the Open University does not offer an EE course, unfortunately.

 

[Cromulent]

Do you already have a degree?

No.