After I decided to get a doctoral degree in mathematics, and was well down that path, I began to notice that many graduates of schools like OU (i.e. not top ten schools) on the whole were not having an easy time finding employment at research universities. Even those who did served multiple postdoctoral appointments before landing the coveted research university professorship. When I started wondering what sort of job I’d like to have outside of an academic one, I realized that other than having learned a lot of nice mathematics and having been trained to think critically, I didn’t have many “marketable skills”. A lot of mathematicians will heatedly disagree with this point, but it was certainly my perspective at the time.
To remedy this situation, I began looking around for internships and research projects on and off campus, where I could pick up useful skills like programming, data analysis, modeling and so on. I spoke the NASA office at OU, but that never really went anywhere. The National Weather Center was a brand spanking new building at the time, and I browsed the website looking for information on the research being done there. I found nothing, and out of desperation I emailed the webmaster of the site, saying in a few sentences who I was and what I was looking for. Then I forgot all about it.
A month later I received a spontaneous email from my current boss, Lou. He told me that he and another researcher had a grant, and wanted to hire a math grad student to work on numerical methods for partial differential equations! I went to meet them, and a few weeks later I had a new office and computer at the National Weather Center, and was learning to program, and more importantly, to think like an applied mathematician, that is to relax my rigid thinking about mathematics to fit more with real problems.
That was in 2007. I’ve now been working at the National Weather Center for 3 years, taking a meteorology class here and there, attending seminars, trying to pick up the fundamentals to understand the problems that meteorologists are trying to solve. I’m still working on numerical methods for partial differential equations, but my thesis is related to a much more physical problem (tornadoes), rather than a comparison of methods used to solve it.
I feel extremely lucky to have made those initial efforts trying to find outside projects. Whether this helps me get a job or not, the work has given me focus where I lacked it. In addition, I simply love the ideas and the problems that meteorologists work on. They have a use for many areas of mathematics, from statistics and partial differential equations to much more abstract topics related to metrics, model comparisons, predictability, and so forth.
Sean M. R. Crowell 