It is humbling to address future and current mathematicians, but as a former algebraic geometer myself, I will do my best to share with you my story. I work as a data scientist, which the Harvard Business Review in 2012 dubbed “the sexiest job of the 21^st century,” at Facebook, which has been ranked by Glassdoor as one of the best companies for which to work. The path that led me from an eager math student who despised applications to where I am today has been a strange one, but the lessons I learned in my undergraduate and graduate math classes have had a profound impact on my ability to analyze concrete problems in industry.

After earning a B.S. in mathematics at UC Davis, I took a year off in which I decided to pursue a graduate education in the same subject. Seven years later, I finally received my doctorate from Purdue University, having written a thesis in the subject of algebraic geometry, and I was eager to take the path which would lead me towards a professorship somewhere. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a post doc in my home country of the US, so I took a position in Saudi Arabia at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, teaching calculus to aspiring petroleum engineers and occasionally publishing a paper. After three years there, I missed California and returned unemployed in the summer of 2012.

I quickly realized the job market for math professors wasn’t promising at the time, so I started looking for industry positions that would be suitable for someone with my background. After extensive Googling, I realized “data scientist” sounded like something I could do. I taught myself some Python and SQL, practiced analyzing and visualizing publicly available data sets in R and Excel, then started applying. After six months of unemployment, I caught a break and was offered a position at a startup in Chicago. The rest, as they say, is history.

My job at Facebook is unique in its flexibility and often quite challenging, though perhaps not in the same way as algebraic geometry. I have worked on game ranking, platform ecosystem health, comment ranking, celebrity usage patterns on Instagram, and discussion of TV show content on Facebook. I was lucky to be the first data scientist on Facebook Live when it launched, and our team helped grow it into one of the biggest live-streaming platforms in the world. The problems I work to solve can either be very technical, involving complex modeling and simulation, or it can be investigatory, requiring me to search for an explanation of an unusual phenomenon, or it can even be exploratory, such as trying to answer vague questions like “What makes a mobile game fun?”

The analytical training that we mathematicians receive put us at a unique advantage in the field of data science. The rigor we’re accustomed to help us break down a general question into concrete analytical pieces which we can answer with data. It is easy for us to spot errors in thinking, or situations where the evidence doesn’t actually answer the question. After learning some basic statistics and the familiarity with an analytical data manipulation environment (e.g. R or Excel), any mathematician can rapidly become a data scientist. The field of data science is also vast, as one can focus on subfields such as product analytics, visualization, or machine learning.

The biggest misconception people have about data science is that they think we all know how to program and have spent many years writing code. While some familiarity with SQL and analytical software is often desired, we are not programmers. We are, if anything, the voice of evidence at a company. We are there to help shape our colleagues’ understanding and intuition based on the data that we see, and to give actionable recommendations that will improve existing products and help define the appropriate strategies. It’s a fun job, and a great option for all mathematicians interested in industry.