Some of us have kids that seem naturally headed towards academic careers, and it might be hard to see what else they could do. Let's brainstorm about alternatives, because we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket.

There are two parts to this.
1. What are those other careers?
2. How do we prepare to be versatile for this wider range?
(The answers depend on the kid of course.)

I'll compare and contrast DS8 (monolithically mathy) and DD5 (more uniformly skilled and versatile) to make the point.

DD5 will probably be fine. With no teacher other than herself so far, she's taught herself a bit of arithmetic, and to read (at 3) and writes a little bit. She is an avid reader. She is also extremely social, and when we go to the park, she'll find a playmate faster than you can blink. We haven't tested yet, but even if she's "only" 98th or 99th %ile across the board in these academic skills, she'll be fine and will have plenty of options with those academic skills and social skills.

However DS8 was born with all his eggs in one basket. He is totally mathy, easily above 99.9th %ile. Though an early self taught reader (at 2), he is not an avid reader. He finds it grueling to read something lengthy, and writing (composing text) is especially burdensome. So the reading and writing are relative weaknesses; he's still well above average, but they require effort. Social skills, however is an absolute weakness. He can be quite socially awkward and inept, though he's okay in a tolerant environment.

DS8 could become a mathematician, but we'd better have a plan B. He might not get a job, or he might want to do something else, and in any case we need more options.

So for DS8 (or anyone extremely mathy, not so read-y, not so writey, and somewhat socially challenged)
1. What are the most suitable careers?
2. How do we prepare him to have these options?

Those of you with kids who seem naturally headed towards academic careers, what are your thoughts on preparing for alternatives? I know it might seem young for career planning, but for DS8 (not DD5) I feel like I need to think this through now.

I've known other kids who did finish a 4 yr degree in their teens or earlier, and all of those were options. Take another bachelor's, grad school, med/law school, work, travel, spend a year or two focused on art or music, volunteer in a service field of interest. Do more than one of the above, serially or concurrently. Change your mind. Change your mind again.

They will find their way. When you have a couple of years to experiment with before you are really ready to take on full adult responsibilities, you have the freedom to invest a little time in additional interests, and the things people wish they could have done.

There are many career options for mathy kids besides academia. Off the top of my head: engineering, biotech, economics, intelligence/national security, any area that involves analyzing big data.

Oh, and the persons of my acquaintance who started uni earliest began college coursework at age nine. Youngest out there may be even younger. So 11 is practically ancient! . Seriously, there is also nothing that says college has to be done in four years either. Take five or six or more years and explore multiple topics. Double or triple major, if you can't decide. (Of course, this assumes that this is financially feasible.). A PG teen is still a kid. Some of them may know what their life's work is already, but many are just as at sea as the next kid, and will need the time to figure themselves out.

DS8 is in that same arc with his own long term plan to be a math professor. If it isn't academia for him, I would guess it would be because he gets tired of schooling. If that is the case, then a strong match for those skills is IT which is a field with many entry points that don't require academic credentials.

So, I encourage him to be comfortable with programming and real world problem solving, and will continue to trust and encourage his explorations. He's also aware of accounting and finance as mathy careers.

FWIW we're not thinking of early college for DS8 (maybe 1 year early). We want him to get into the best place he can, and the competition will be tough at the regular age, let alone younger.

Top 0.1% of kids a certain age, say 8, in the USA means top 4000 kids. There's a lot of competition for college places, and later, jobs.

You could look at the Careers section of the Mathematical Association of America site http://www.maa.org/careers , which mentions a book which can be previewed:

http://www.maa.org/publications/books/101-careers-in-mathematics
101 Careers in Mathematics - Third Edition (2014)
by Andrew Sterrett

A few other ideas--cryptography, financial engineering, risk management, robotics, operations management.

There are many fields of applied statistics.

We're talking about elementary students?

The conversation in our house is about keeping options open - the mantra in our house is that the world is wide open to them. To keep it wide open, they need to work on a variety of academic and social/personal skills, even if they don't appear to be relevant to their area of talent now.

I've actually refused to engage with teachers and administrators on what careers my kids are suited to, and the language arts teacher got a dressing down from me when she told me that DD was not likely to be a novelist or journalist or anything because DD says she hates writing. My 11 year old is a totally different kid than she was 2 years ago (when we put her on an IEP for writing) and a totally different kid than 2 years before that (skipped a year of math after extensive testing). How are we to predict this kid as an adult if we can't even see 2 years out?

But shouldn't they be his career ideas?

Either way, I agree that 8 is very young for career planning. Like GeoFizz, we tell our kids they have options. Two of them talk about what they want to do, and we encourage them. We don't plan for them. Plus, at a very young age, too much information about careers or working when you're a grownup can be offputting for some kids. My 14-year-old tenth-grader has only started thinking vaguely about these ideas in the past year or so. He'll start getting more serious this coming academic year as a junior, and that's fine with us.

Totally agree.

YES!! This. SO much.

DD14 has only the most vague of ideas, really-- she's just too interested in too many things. This causes her a great deal of anxiety because most of her friends seem to be the types who are less even/global in ability, and therefore have a far better idea what "their thing" is going to turn out to be.

We have encouraged a major in Math/stats or another STEM field that will translate well into a wide variety of things that she has had sustained interest in-- but not because she isn't interested in the humanities or good at them, but because her odds of finding a deeper pool of similar, cognitively able people is higher in those fields like physics, math, and chemistry than it is in history, elementary education, or psychology.

Like Geofizz, we're about "don't close doors" and not about "choose! choose!" around here.

DD hasn't seen enough of life and the world around her to be able to make an informed decision, and she knows this. I think that makes her wiser than some of her 18yo peers who think that they have, truthfully.

You and geofizz have a point, but there are some "behind-the-scenes" careers that may not cross the minds of even high school students unless someone brings them up. What fraction of the population knows what an actuary does or has considered an actuarial career? I did not until I was well into physics graduate school. (I went into finance instead.)

What does he want to do? Have you asked him? My twins (7) have a long list of careers they want to do - inventor, artist, poet, archeologist, nuclear physicist, epidemiologist, chemist, and toxicologist; just to name a few. It constantly changes (with the exception of chemist - that has been mentioned for a very long time).

I tell them that they can do anything they want, if they are willing to work for it.

Social skills are going to be important in any job, so if you already think those are a concern, then possibly work on that.

However, in my personal experience (and also with my peers), any career that a parent was pushing was the career least likely to be chosen.

We do emphasize the importance of college and graduate school. Right now, they are planning to go to schools in other country, but I expect that will change. If not, we will help them strategize as to how to choose a school.

That's the part about telling our kids they have options.

My DS15 doesn't have a clue what he wants to do yet, although I assume it will likely be in the STEM area, math/computer science/engineering/science realm. Kids who have strong mathematical abilities can be successful in any of these fields and don't necessary need to go into academia. Many of the people I know including myself went into fields in computer science. And there still is a huge demand in that particular field. At this stage one thing we are doing with his lack of motivation is having him look at possible career choices to hopefully motivate him to do better in H.S. so that he can go to university.

Most of my peers when I was in H.S. who were gifted math students, went into computer programing or other computer science related fields. We joke around our house that if my husband hadn't gone into academia we could have been millionaires, because he did get an offer to work in the early days at a start-up that shall remain nameless.

Indeed. DD's love of statistics has led us to describe "actuarial science" for her quite explicitly since she was about five years old. Because it's not something that you hear much about, but BOY, is it ever important in a variety of fields.

Bostonian, your post made me chuckle, since everyone in our household is fully aware of those options in particular. Esoteric, probably, to be sure-- but it's been a relatively frequent topic of discussion here. DD really likes the idea of flagging people for insurance fraud, for example.

In the U.S. most states require English through year 12. All universities require passing a writing class, although many universities accept on of the AP English courses. In the U.S. to get a BA one must take a maximal set of breadth coursework.

IMO I think this is one of the good things about the U.S. system. Students don't have to know early as early what they want. I have seen many a student go to university only to change directions completely. Although it sure helps to know if you are going in a STEM direction or a art direction, or a language arts direction by the end of the sophomore year in H.S. But what courses one takes the last two years of H.S. can vary widely depending on what one intends to do after H.S. ie go to university to study STEM, go to art school, or a culinary arts program. One can't go wrong by taking the more advanced route.. one can always study advanced math & science, and history. Then study poly-sci at university. But it's hard to get into STEM programs if one hasn't taken advanced math & science in H.S.

I have to say that I'm not convinced that the "Lisa" model is necessarily a bad thing for a child 8-10 years of age at this point in time and human history.

Workplace change has been so rapid-- for example, DD had envisioned becoming a research professor as her de facto career path, until she (and we) realized that with most public institutions running more and more toward adjuncts-as-faculty, the tenure model may really and truly be gone in twelve years when she is there.

So in some respects, I'm glad that she's more flexible than that. I would NOT have predicted the whole.sale (sorry--it's to get around the netnanny) move toward adjunct teaching even at state flagships and tier one institutions even five or six years ago, and I'm pretty well in tune with that environment. The speed of that transition has been breathtaking, frankly.

Taking the most demanding coursework available without failing to develop a well-rounded appreciation for other areas of study-- that's the ideal that we've attempted to communicate to DD as keeping the most options open. EVERYONE needs scientific and communications literacy skills, and everyone needs numeracy. The deeper and more expert those skills, the better. No matter where you wind up, that much is true.

Developing individual passions is a second pillar of our approach. Sure, they may not be truly viable career paths, but why on earth would I stop my 10yo from drawing Pokemon creatures if that makes her happy? I don't consider that kind of time "wasted." I mean, why play chess for that matter-- it's not as though very many people are going "pro" at that.

Having a STEM career I can say that even within my particular degree there is a HUGE variety of job opportunities (and that is just within my specific branch). I've worked with people with a wide variety of degrees (math, various science and various engineering specialties) and I have classmates of my particular specialty that went into a wide variety of fields. In the end I think the comments about keeping doors open (while avoiding closing any if possible) is very appropriate. Learning about various options is interesting (and will eventually be useful) but knowing the general direction can be enough as long as you are going in the right general direction. Slight course corrections are usually workable unless you want to completely switch to something in the Arts.

I will also say that I started engineering thinking I was going to do X. In second year I was going to do Y and then about a week before we had to specialize switched to Z. I've worked in the field for almost 20 years and my exact job has changed many times over that time. In the end something that changes constantly has been the perfect match for me. DH totally stumbled into his STEM career as well. In the end both of us couldn't be happier.

I'll be shocked if DS8 chooses a non-STEM career (he's very math/science focused and has been since birth it seems). We talk about a variety of fields to try to show him a glimpse of what is out there. Our DD5 seems more even so we really have no idea. For us that might be more of a challenge since we don't have the same network for learning about the non-STEM options. At least we have time.

And what you love and are good at may not be as important in the long run as what your personality/temperament is compatible with. Many jobs show a face that is less than 5% of the actual work. A creative person may find they spend more time filling out paperwork and sitting in meetings than designing things. Or a "big-thinking" oriented science major may spend all their day reading numbers off a reactor with nothing to do if the device never fails.

I might also suggest robotics which is a VERY quickly growing industry and shows every sign of continuing to do so for at least a couple of decades.

I'd suggest to all members here not to count out the construction trades. There are REALLY good jobs in the construction industry that are extremely challenging and pay quite handsomely and there are immediate job openings all over for high end positions.

Good point. It is not unusual for recent grads from our local voc-tech high school to be pulling down $60-90/hr entry-level jobs, with union protections, which makes it possible to get through college without any loans, should you choose to do so.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. One of my main thoughts when I wrote the OP is the difference between a specialist and a generalist, when it comes to natural abilities. The specialist is more vulnerable. They may succeed in their narrow area of high ability, but if not, they can be in worse shape than the generalist who naturally has a wider range of options.

The U. S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook may be of interest: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/

That is not always the case. If you are too much of a generalist, you may end up not really being strong in one area - leaving you vulnerable too. My particular group (in high tech) is most or less a group that has a lot of folks that would been seen as "generalist" due to the broad range of environments/tools we support, but most of us still have certain areas where we have strong expertise and then just general knowledge for the basics in the other areas my team supports (enough to handle most of the daily requests that comes in when needed). I have noticed that those of us on my team with very strong skills in our areas are usually most sought after by users and their managers (even if some areas, we have no clue) and those who only know the bare basics of all tools but no real depth in anything are just as actively avoided. And our environment is changing all the time (some of us have better capacity to adjust and learn on the spot as our work environment changes than others).

From what I have seen, in some areas, generalists are first to be laid off if they are not perceived as being strong in any area (meaning they are seen as easy to replace and get someone else trained if the company grows again).

Regardless of whether you are seen as more of a generalist or specialist, due to the rapid changes in many fields, everyone has to be able to adapt to and adopt new technologies and changes. If you are too rigid and always resist change in your field, you most likely will be left behind. I believe this is true in most fields.

Really? Huh. People are so different! It would never occur to me to have this conversation.

I definitely talk about careers with my kids, but at this point it mostly takes the form of talking about what jobs are out there. If we know or meet or encounter someone with an especially interesting job or one that seems relevant to my kids' interests or skills, I try to bring that up, especially. I would like to have my kids meet and shadow more of these adults as they get older.

It's more about making sure they know what's out there and have given it more than cursory thought than trying to figure out exactly what will suit them, IMO. My own professional skills and inclinations are evolving even now.

Years ago Drucker estimated that the typical knowledge worker turns over what they know every 5 years or so (Maybe not 100% - but close). So being adaptable like notnafnaf mentioned seems key.

Speaking of careers, ran across a video of Cedric Villani (Fields Medal awardee) at TedX talking about being a mathematician. My son and I really enjoyed watching it last night.

I suppose the question is, what should we be doing now or in the near future?

ETA:
Kind of. The specific scenario I fear, is one many of us have seen namely a person that sees themselves as being on a clear trajectory to academia, but one way or another they don't make it. They end up underemployed in various ways, or outright unemployed. They may struggle finding alternatives, and may realize in hindsight they wish they could rewind the clock and do things differently.

It's also debabtable whether academia is that great a career anyway.

That is because academia is not a life for everyone, it's still a job and it really varies from field to field what it's like. You have to have to be good at many different skills. It's more than just sitting in a lab doing research on your own. To be successful as an academic you not only have to do interesting research but you have to be able to write well, give talks on the subject, be very self directed, teach classes to undergraduates, graduates, and do service to the university that can include administrative work and contentious committee meetings. And what you spend your time doing varies quite a lot depending on what your field of study.

One rarely gets rich as an academic, unless ones does outside consulting or starts your own business. And depending on where you get a job can either give you a comfortable living, or afters years of schooling still be struggling financially while working 60+ hours. Full time tenure positions are becoming more rare. And more PhD's end up with adjust positions that pay poorly.

I know many very happy very successful academics, and I have also known many whom after 2-5 years leave for the business world because it's not the right place for them.

Some PhDs in the sciences with programming and modeling skills are leaving academia to become "data scientists". The money is very good.

Big Data's High-Priests of Algorithms
By ELIZABETH DWOSKIN
Wall Street Journal
August 8, 2014

Thanks, Bostonian. I suppose there are all sorts of jobs 15 or 25 years in the future that we can't envision now, just as ther are things now that we didn't envision 15 or 25 years ago.

As parents, how do we prepare our children for the future?

Bostonian, that's a great write-up! Data science is what I think my DD is most likely to go into. It appeals to her on every level, and plays to all of her strengths intellectually.

Thanks, but the sentence

makes even a market fundamentalist like me wonder about how brainpower is being deployed.

It is a disturbing question, in general. Such as: How much new science is being missed by brain-power sequestored in IT departments making a decent income re-writing programs to calculate taxes on teddy bear sales?

At least in theory, data scientist may be generating techniques and models relevant to multiple applications (if those applications are made or allowed to be made.) I could easily imagine population linking models being used to increase the understanding of epigenetics. My futurist projection is that the hottest area in 10-15 years will be cross-pollination.

Exactly-- and this isn't really news to anyone in STEM, or shouldn't be, anyway. It's been true for the past three decades that one of the hottest tickets in all of STEM is to be a cross-disciplinary polymath. The smartest, most capable people in new/emerging/cross-disciplinary fields aren't the ones trained in that specialty, but the ones that have trained using the supporting or related ones (plural) since their understanding is deeper in both domains. Better leverage.

This is, when you get right down to it, what informatics specialists and quants are doing as well; leveraging multiple training domains and formidable intellect on a different, unrelated domain and tasks.

Plenty of precedent for it, too: modern genetics was re-made into a rigorous discipline in the 1950s by disenchanted post-bomb physicists, re-made again into molecular genetics by chemists in the 1980s & 90s, and is in the process of being re-made yet again, into genomics, by information specialists from various disciplines.

The market is people, and people are often irrational.

How is that irrational?

The market simply values businessmen more highly than scientists.

If businessmen are more valuable, then it logically follows that businessmen are more highly compensated.

You first have to make a value assertion so that you have something upon which to perform your rational operation upon.

If people within a market prefer businessmen more, because businessmen are inherently awesome or because businessmen shimmer with financial glory, then you rationally pay them more.

Maybe people value basking in the reflected dollar-saturated glow of their local wealthy businessmen.

Or maybe it's just that the businessmen make the salary decisions.

That's a valid point, but there's another point. Some of those data crunchers are physicists who couldn't have got a job in physics because the jobs simply aren't there.

Then there are the erstwhile academics and the ones who didn't even bother trying because funding rates are so low. Why waste your time?

That's because jobs are poofed into existence by job creators.

Job creators currently dislike physicists for some reason.

However, they *love* teddy bear taxation issues.

Then those salary decisions are definitely rational.

It makes sense to give yourself a really high salary if you like really high salaries.

Hello. OP here.

Math, intentional training in versatility, and a web cam.

I would add "solid expository writing and presentation skills (and probably an Internet connection for the webcam).

Improv is a great universal skill.

But digging in a little further, as it has got me thinking about the deeper topic. I think if you are functionally monolithic, maybe what you need is to look to the core skill more as a lens rather than worrying about the skillset which will be self-addressing. That means say for math, maximizing the exposure of applications then your option is to shoe horn across to another field.

Or maybe you abstract math out to the "science of patterns" and emphasize using that patterning skillset to identify and think about patterns in any situation whether it is math-based or not.

Longer term, if you had to choose between going deep and learning intensely in a field or emphasizing flexibility and autodidactic flightiness, which has the bigger payoff?

I like expository writing, as that can be a leg up in traditional work or allows for blogging or other content generation if you develop a mile deep core skill.

All food for thought, more valuable perhaps if homeschooling. Also, don't ignore the implications of the maker movement and 3d printing, as design will become a much more valuable skill.

And must be late as my rambling also has me thinking: why in the heck am I letting public schools teach my child with their classically twenty year backwards post-sightedness?

Yeah. I got some great advice once; it was "Don't become an expert in a narrow technique. What will you do when the technique gets outdated? Instead, be a problem-solver and learn new techniques to solve problems."


I don't think this is an either-or proposition. I like people who teach themselves new skills. People who dig deep on their own show evidence of strong internal drive. Get those people working together on something here excited about and the results can be terrific.


Because they're "certified" (tm) and "accredited" (tm) and are Experts in (this space left intentionally blank). Don't you feel better now?

Just noticed this thread and I wanted to mention to 22B that your son sounds similar to my DS15. And my DS15 has always seemed similar to me to my own older brother. When my older brother & I when were were in early elementary we were the most advanced students in a public school that let us more at our own pace. This was the 70's when public schools were experimenting with innovative teaching styles and we were left to move through the curriculum as fast as we wanted. And then we moved.

Skipping over a lot of details by H.S. my brother was one of those unmotivated gifted kids. Grades went up & down, had better things to do in H.S. than study. He would start failing, my parents would sit on him and his grades would go up. Bright could do anything his made up his mind to do. I found out recently that he wanted to take a year or two off school before going to college but that wasn't encouraged at the time and my parents didn't "let" him. Ended up a large university in a big city with a so-so reputation. He never graduated from college, we lost communications with him for a few years, he seemed to drift and try a lot of different low paying jobs for a number of years.

But eventually he found his nitch. It's not the job anyone would have dreamed for him when he was 10. He now owns and runs a unusual retail businesses, one he started by working as a clerk and quickly working his way up to head manager. Eventually the owner offered to sell it to him. He clearly has a comfortable and successful life. Not one that my parents or he would have expected when he was younger.