How heavily is math incorporated in your daily workday?

Hi,

I work as network engineer and use math quiet often. We use math to solve problems related to ip addressing, to convert Binary and Hexa decimal to decimal values, calculate packet loss in network, calculate bandwidth utilization and in many more areas.

Math is much more important in your daily life. As you finish school and begin your new life outside of home, your personal finances become so important. Once you begin to understand that you need to accumulate assets, minimize expenses and prepare your own taxes, the math required at work will become so much easier to grasp and understand.

I have worked in the High-Tech environment in Silicon Valley for the past 30+ years at both Apple and Cisco. In jobs ranging from IT analyst, Project Manager, Customer listening & surveying, Business Intelligence, etc. I have not had a need to use advanced math on a daily basis. A basic grasp of statistics has been very useful and basic accounting practices are very useful in a business environment.

Bottom line: I suspect you may have a fear of math (my son did as well.) There are many careers where daily use of math is not critical. Don't limit your thinking or interests based on a fear of math.

As a business analyst at Cisco, I rarely use math on the job. I would, however, recommend that you learn excel. Excel is a program by microsoft that is the industry standard for creating spreadsheets. If you know excel well, you can use it to do almost all of your math. Additionally, knowing how to read spreadsheets is important for nearly any business role.

Here is a link to the basics, but you should continue to find more resources as you begin to learn the basics.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-for-windows-training-9bc05390-e94c-46af-a5b3-d7c22f6990bb

It really depends on what you do. I work in the tech field as an analyst and my work requires a general grasp of common mathematical concepts; statistics, graphing/data visualization, and some mathematical modeling. I know people who use very little math (Social workers, for example), or use tons of math (accountants, statisticians, research scientists). Even when math is used, there's a range in terms of the amount and complexity.

You can use as little or as much math as you want, so long as you are flexible with the career path you want to pursue. I will note, as a person with a math degree I've noticed people generally don't like math, and because people don't like it, it pays to be good at it, since less people are willing to learn it and the skill-set is therefore more scarce, which drives up the value and thus, what employers are willing to pay you. The fewer people there are that are able/willing to do something that is in demand, the more their skills are worth.