What does the life in a mathematics student
wait what's the day in the life sorry have you gotten the question wrong
what opportunities do you oh no much that one up oh I'm next sorry
do you want me to start? Hi my name is Sara and I'm a lecturer at the school
of mathematics and physics at UQ and i'm here with Sean to answer your
questions Okay I've got the first question, what
has been the most unexpected thing you have been happy to discover at UQ?
For me one of the things that I was like not expecting was
actually the dynamic between lecturers and students because you go from school
where you're like sitting in a classroom and you call them
mr and mrs or sir or whatever it may be and then they'll jump
in and they've got like 20 years experience they've literally
got a PhD they've done groundbreaking research and
they're like hi guys I'm Dave and then they're like so the lecturers
are so happy to just talk to you about anything they're
really welcoming and open with their time I wasn't
expecting them to be so happy for you to just rock up like like
organize a time for you to be one-on-one to explain some of the
coursework yeah um that's one of the things I wasn't
expecting but I think it's great and it really
it actually helped me learn a lot well for me as a lecturer that's like one of
the most rewarding parts of the job too I love
that student interaction and yeah if you have a set office hour time
and like nobody shows up you're sort of thinking
where is everybody but i love it when students do want to come and chat or
when you can chat in lecture itself that's also really fun. So, what
is it about UQ's approach that makes us the most employable graduates in the
state? I think for one thing we give students
good challenging problems to work on during their degree
and I think that by seeing a problem that at the outset
looks really challenging and then you make some progress on that and you
realize oh hold on I can tackle that then you
gain that confidence to take a look at any other problem whether it be in
industry or somewhere else and actually make progress there and not
be afraid from the outset the other thing I think we will do
really well is focus on communication I think it's really incredible to see
our students getting opportunities to practice their science communication or
their mathematics communication and I think that's an incredibly
valuable skill. What does a day in the life of a mathematics student look like?
It really depends day to day because you've got
lectures, you've also got tutorials and sometimes practicals or times where
you're working in computer labs but normally I
wake up come to uni spend anywhere between
three and five hours doing some uni work um then go home and i get a chance to do
whatever else I need to do. And how much work would you say
you spend on self-study outside of the directed lecture and workshop
sort of tutorial? Not enough it's what would you recommend? Okay so
they say you should spend I think it's 10 hours
per subject per week which comes to about 40 hours which is
manageable and normally that also includes like lecture
and prac and tutorial times and they tell you that so
it's somewhere between two and three hours per subject per week
sometimes it's more because you've just got to focus on this assignment
or you've got this exam coming up so you'll have to do a little bit more but
sometimes it's a little less. What opportunities do your students have
to get hands-on experience in our industry?
So in mathematics, at the department we have industry placement and we also have
summer research programs and winter research programs and the MC summer
school and winter school so I think those give really good examples where
students can get into industry or even work with an academic on a
research problem over a semester and just
see how that works. What are the most valuable skills you've learned as part
of your degree? So one of them is communication, you
mentioned before it's something that perhaps we're lacking
um in the sciences like well while we're able to have a discussion
about maths things it can be difficult to just bring that out to
your grandma who did high school maths and she was great at that
but she's missing three years that we've just built upon
our knowledge so understanding your audience yeah absolutely you've got to
sort of tailor it to um who's listening and I think that's a
focus that was um they in first year
we actually looked at all right how do you prepare
students for the future when we don't know what the future looks like
that's a really good question and I think that being
able to take a hard problem or a complicated
slightly ambiguous problem and then not feel scared of it I think
that skill just is so broadly applicable that no matter what future directions
you go in that skill will serve you yeah and I
think that mathematics training really gives
you that sort of foundational ability to take a hard
problem and then sort of make it into a formal
formal problem and make progress on that and I think
that that way of thinking makes you unafraid to tackle new things
so I think even unafraid in other areas yeah um so I think that's probably the
biggest skill is trying trying things that challenge you. How
does the way you learn at UQ teach you the skills that you need to
face an unknown future? Certainly with the vast majority of
lecturers I've had they've taught the content
that they have to get through but they know what
is needed in the actual job which is sometimes different
from the specific coursework um and so like I've got I've had some of the best
recommendations on what is the really valuable skills
that you're going to go through in life in my third year statistics courses um
the lecturers are just um they'll talk about the
theory behind it and perhaps the the special like the the precise
mathematics yeah but then almost every lecture they'll be
they'll say right so we're going to go into maybe
matlab or maybe some computer programming software um
and we're going to do an example and it doesn't really matter the numbers
but they show this is what you're doing and so when
you get a different problem you just go straight into the
software start doing it and it does incredibly
complex things incredibly quickly it does yes but i mean having that
foundational understanding means that when you run the program
you understand what's going on rather than just running it and saying i
believe this output even though the output might be
wrong based on what you've done so i think that understanding the
fundamental mathematics that underpins those programs is an
incredibly useful definitely a set knowledge base but also
yeah the skill of being able to ask the program to do something for you
that's really incredible skill yeah definitely. If you were employing the next
mathematics graduate, what would you be looking for? So
somebody with strong quantitative foundations but more than
the strong foundations it's sort of like a
curiosity someone who's actually passionate about
a question and can also communicate their curiosity if
somebody is very passionate about what they're
looking at and and can communicate that to others i think that's an incredibly
valuable skill and the quantitative side is really
important having that basic foundation but it's probably not as important to be
like 100 marks everywhere as it is to balance with the passion and
the curiosity I'd say as well. What do you think employers in your
industry are looking for and how do you think UQ has equipped you
with these skills? I think there's there's two big ones um
and the ones I was thinking about is you've got to be able to work in a
multi-multi-disciplinary team yes um and the other one which sort of
feeds into it is um you've got to be able to get to
the essence of a problem often you'll probably be
working and you'll be either you personally just
yourself or you and a team will be the math specialists that help
other people do their jobs in some other field
they'll often come to you with their problems and
this is where the second part comes in of getting to the essence of the problem
they'll talk to you in their language about this is what's going on
we need the solution to this and you need to be able to pick out the maths
parts yes and then often it's helpful to present
it back to them in the the way they're used to because
they might just tune out if you start going for the math
side of it yeah um but you don't need to because you're
confident and you've done that you can just say this is this is what we
can do this is where we go. And do you feel like you've developed
that skill to pull out the essence of a problem and then also to communicate it
to different sorts of teams? Definitely um there's
been on more than one occasion like more than
one courses more than one course we've had a maths style problem it might
be like uh talking about the statistics around
an experiment and they'll be very clearly assessing
your skills and they they teach that and help you with that in tutorials and
lectures If you could give me one piece of advice
that would set me apart as a job candidate
what would it be? I would say breadth of experience as well as depth
right so I would say as well as studying the
mathematics and all the foundation that you are working on
thinking about as you say you like zoology the fact that you've
gained that breadth and you've looked at the way somebody else might work in
an interdisciplinary field or a multi-disciplinary field
that breadth will make you a stronger candidate I believe
okay so is it um you said breadth and depth is there is there a
balance that you sort of need to be favoring one or the
other? Um I would say depth is probably very
important if you want to be a specialist but you want a sprinkling of that
breadth otherwise you become too sort of centered on only what you do
and you don't see how other people view that
okay and I think that that breadth is really important to gain somewhere
even if it's in a first year interdisciplinary course or if it's in a
dual degree or if it's an industry placement or even
it doesn't have to be in your course work
but it can be through like UQ life things UQ
teams or volunteering or something like that that gives you breadth beyond
just the rigor of your study I think. What makes a good student and are they
the same things that make a good job candidate?
They probably are quite similar things yeah so I would say
um a good attitude towards the problems that you're working on
and the ability to schedule your time as well and that's something that i think
students really maybe lack at the beginning but really
do develop quite quickly so a good student is somebody who can
manage their time is unafraid to take on problems
and then is unafraid to sort of talk to other people when they get stuck
because in the real world in industry or in any job
if you are stuck on something you should talk to your boss or talk to your
colleagues about whatever it is that you're stuck on
and i think that um lack of fear to communicate with other people
and to sort of push forward on a problem i think that's a really
useful skill that's hard to write down on a resume though isn't it yeah
so i think that you get some of that from the breadth
of what you study okay um and also just through a degree you learn some of these
skills anyways the time management and and that sort of ability to
communicate to others. What have you learned about yourself
since you began your studies at UQ? When I came in in first year I knew I
was good at science I knew I was good at maths
I'd done well enough at school to be able to get into the program at UQ
but I didn't really know what kind of study like what kind of science I wanted
to look at in high school I'd focus mainly on
chemistry and physics but I took a biology course
and realized that that's actually really interesting yeah and it wasn't
actually till I did a second year course I was like wow I really
really love animals like I just enjoy spending time with animals
until I've done that those course those courses although I
knew I liked animals it hadn't really clicked with me that
you can do this you can study this and this can be part of your life
And that deeper understanding of them gave you more of an appreciation for
them? Definitely yeah yeah yeah there's some very cool animals
out there that's awesome um i think we're done i think that was
my last question too