B.S. Mathematics and Computer Science 2020 Career: Senior Software Engineer @ Array (August 2024 - Current); Software Engineer @ Google (Aug 2020 - Jan 2024); Software Engineering Intern @ Google (Summer 2019); Applications Programmer @ UAB (Apr 2017 - July 2018);

For me, there were three reasons to pursue a math degree: (1) genuine curiosity, (2) enhancing my capacity to reason about and write correct software, and (3) between math and computer science, math is much more difficult to self-teach. Every math course has some interesting nuggets you can bring into your career. My favorites were Advanced Calculus and Mathematical Modeling.

Having a strong math foundation has come in handy most days on the job, from interpreting percentiles and confidence intervals for product / performance metrics to tweaking a distributed system's random network retry logic to avoid a server traffic spike (you should both love and fear the Central Limit Theorem). Correct code that handles all cases reads like a proof, and justifying a refactor to colleagues looks just like defending one, too.

The best advice I can give to undergraduate students is to develop your curiosities. Learn to nerd out and deep dive on new topics, then apply your findings. You'll end up with people lining up to get an expert opinion.