Higher Education in Mathematics

Admission process to Delhi University colleges is going on. India's best students opt for Delhi University colleges and B. Sc.(Honors) in Mathematics is one of the most popular courses. Students scoring less than 92% marks do not get admission to this course in the North Campus colleges. Many of the students we admit come with a full score in Mathematics. From our college prospectus to the newspaper and other fora which discuss the benefits of an honors course in Mathematics end up with telling use of Mathematics in Finance, Actuarial Sciences, Accountancy and Information Technology.

I had been trying to tell the students who are already into the B.Sc.(Maths) course or are aspiring for it about the opportunities in Higher Education in Mathematics. I tried to justify before them that higher education in Mathematics can be looked upon as a good career choice. But finally I felt that I was trying to justify it just for the sake of justification, or for I was into it.

Job- in a nation like India where unemployment is an extremely serious issue, this word is one of the most significant things in one's life. Though I never defined a good job in terms of salary, I can not out rightly deny this aspect. If salary is not the only thing which determines quality of an occupation, it certainly uses to be a major factor. Second thing which judges a job is stability and scopes of promotion. Now let us look at the scene when you try to convince a student to opt for higher education in Mathematics and a career in Mathematics Teaching and Research. The first thing that gives almost a shock to the students is the fact that to get into this profession, one needs to spend nearly 10 years after graduation. Two years for M. Sc., at least five years for Ph. D. and about three years for post doctoral research, all this sum up to 10 years. There are examples where after spending so much time, people are holding a contractual position and working under pressure to produce research papers.

People have started believing that these days(after sixth pay commission) teaching and research profession offers respectable salary. Well, that might be true with people who believe in austerity but looking at the inflation and dearness, this salary does not seem to be too high. Also, MNC offer many jobs immediately after graduation with almost same salary as much a fresh faculty at some University would get.

When you are unable to justify that a job of a Mathematician is superior to the other options students are looking for, or at least it is equally good, you also find yourself unable to convince students to understand the subject. Till 10+2 standard, students broadly used to learn algorithms, formulas and their applications in problem solving. There was a very little abstraction of the subject. But as soon as a student enters an Undergraduate course in Mathematics, he/she encounters a lot of abstraction of ideas. It really takes time to grasp those concepts and feel that these are pure thoughts which actually result in any development of the subject towards an application. Even if I try too hard to make students understand the concepts of algebra and analysis, they do not take interest in the subject. This is the scene with all the colleges of Delhi University and this is story of every teacher. Ultimately, a nice syllabus is reduced to a compact form, exercises are excluded, a trivial question paper and giving marks on stupid meaningless sentences in the name of lenient marking is what we all forced to practice. I sometimes wonder what is the point in having one such course and recruiting pure mathematicians as teachers. The University should increase seats in Commerce and Economics courses and introduce new courses designed to benefit actuarial sciences and accountancy students.