learning-math-at-28-43a03922759d

Posted in:Favors Personal Growth Vents Career Growth

Hi ladies,

I feel that math has always kept me from reaching careers and being in industries that I'm really interested in like Biomedical, Aerospace and Biotech. Recently, I made a decision to study math, starting from 3rd grade math at 28 years old. I'm going through IXL workbooks, Khan Academy and Brilliant.org.

Today, I was thinking about other people who might have had their careers deviated because of having a bad history with math. I'm wondering, have you struggled with math before? Has it kept you from being able to enter an industry or job? Have you been able to conquer it and break in or have you changed your career goals because of it? If you conquered it, how did you get better at math?

I'm interested in running a journales-que article on the experience and I was curious to hear from this community. I will not mention any names. I'm just trying to get an overall understanding of whether I'm the only one with this issue. And if I'm not the only one, how are others navigating it?

Toccara131·Jun 26

What an interesting topic! When I was in university, I'm often in conversations where people would say "I wish I was a software developer but I'm terrible at math". Similarly, I would usually say "I wish I went into the medical field but I'm terrible at science.".All the way up to university, I was decent at math, so I pursued Computer Science in university. I was completely blindsided how broad mathematics was and found myself doing terribly in university at math. Struggling to pass courses (and repeating courses), I really questioned whether I was going to graduate. I was very much on the edge of dropping out (and getting kicked out).In the end, I finally managed to "fake it till you make it". I only learn and memorize as much course materials as possible, I didn't learn as much as I wanted to... but at least I graduated! So... I don't think I really got better at math, but I had a better understanding of what kind of learner I was (visual, practical, etc.) and adapted my studying habits to that. This post really got me thinking of maybe taking up more math courses on the side now that I'm not being graded or on a time constraint. I'm following your Medium :) Your journey is amazing!!

Iynna·Jun 29

I loved math growing up but ended up being totally lost when I reached high school so I ended up hating it haha!Basically i went to school in france and was deep in the french school system where in your second year of HS (out of 3 years) you have to pick a specialisation: 1) Social Sciences + Econ., 2) Sciences, 3) Literature. The first one was where the cool kids that were mid/average in class would go, the second was for the geeks and super smart folks would go because they'd have a future/high paying jobs, and the third one was for people who would be unemployed in the future. It's such an awful framework, but that's how it was stereotyped/known at the time... So of course being the daughter of African immigrants, my only option was to go into the sciences route, and in that specialisation, you'd have to take another sub spec. (Biology, Chemistry, and Math)Math was known to be SUPER hard and I wanted to do that but i had become so bad at math that I went for Chemistry - where I was considerably better.I ended up being so interested in social sciences and that's what I ended up pursuing (I did International Affairs), I went through a few pivots and surprise I am in venture capital. While it's helpful to have some basic understanding of math (which helps with concepts in finance) let me tell you that knowing the Pythagorean theorem (which i actually loved learning about) didn't take me anywhere.In the grand scheme of things, I'd have LOVED to have a combination of the threee spec. in high school because I loved chemistry, i loved philosophy and french lit, and i also loved my classes in history ... I will say there are some specific technical degrees like computer science, data science where it can be helpful to have a grasp of math - doesn't mean you need to be a math genius but at least getting the logic behind it.