Hi and welcome. My name is Christina Morin and I teach in the Math department here at the University in New Haven. I'm here today to talk to you a little bit about our Math degree programs. We offer three different degree programs in Math and Actuarial Sciences. We have a BS in Mathematics, a 4+1 linked Math BS and Data Science MS, and a BS in Actuarial Science.
A BS in Mathematics prepares students for careers at the forefront of pure and applied mathematics. And we'll talk a little bit about what those careers are as we go through today's slides. We also offer 4+1 linked Math BS and Data Science MS. This program allows students to complete an undergraduate and graduate degree in just five years. If you do your Bachelor's and Master's as separate degree programs, this usually takes a little bit longer.
We also offer a BS in Actuarial Science, and BS in Actuarial Science as it sounds prepare students for a career as an Actuary. But as we go through today's slides, we'll talk a little bit about what an Actuary does, and some of the other career options for you besides being an Actuary with an Actuarial degree. So what can I do with a BS in Math? It turns out there is a lot of things that you can do with a BS in Math or a BS in Actuarial Sciences.
With a BS in Math, you can be a Data Scientist or Analyst, an Actuary, a Statistician, Cryptographer, an Operations Research Analyst, a Quantitative Analyst, an Animator, an insurance industry professional, a Crypt Analyst for the CIA or the NSA, and the list continues. As we're starting to see, more companies really collect more and more data, think about how much data we're generating on a day-to-day basis with all of the things that are our lives that are connected to the internet, we're starting to see an increased demand for people with a math, statistics, actuarial type skill set to handle all that data and to help companies with that.
In addition to moving right into a career after your undergraduate degree, you could continue to graduate school to study math and statistics, app education, operations, research, law, architecture, MBA, finance, and economics, really quantitative skills that will set you up well, for a lot of different graduate degree programs.
So what is a Data Scientist who mentioned a Data Scientist is one of the careers that you could go into with a Math degree. A Data Scientist organizes and analyzes large amounts of data, using mathematical and computing such programming skills and then they translate those results into ways that will help the business make decisions. And that's a really cool thing, right? During all of this math, all this analysis, and say, "Okay, now how do we communicate that? How do we tell other people in the company what's going on? And then what do we actually do with this? What does this data tell us that we should do as a company? What's our next best move?"
What type of skills do Data Scientists need? So Data Scientists needs skill sets in statistics and probability. Think what's the outcome or likelihood that a certain event would happen? Statistics, maybe we can say, what are some descriptive values that describe something about our customer group? Or if I did see two different data sets that say had customers that received one offer and customers that received another offer? Could I show that there was a statistically significant difference in the behavior of those customers, linear algebra, and then some programming mostly in Python, or R, which will help you work with those datasets?
Where do Data Scientists work? Any organization that collects and analyzes large data. We're starting to see the list of businesses that have a need for Data Scientists-- Grubb or talking Amazon, Google, meta Microsoft, any healthcare organization, financial services and investment firms, consulting firms, aviation, travel, tourism. Right, you can probably start to generate as you're starting to hear these lists out government as well. As you're hearing the different types of companies or roles that Data Scientists can be in, you're probably starting to think of, "Oh, I could see where we might use data there. I can see how for travel, knowing something about what consumers are going to do would be hugely helpful to the company or as an airplane." What is consumer behavior? How does that influence pricing? What does an actuary do?
So Actuaries measure and manage risk by determining the likelihood of events using math, stats, and finance. They help leaders to make strategic decisions and communicate findings to a variety of business people in other roles. This picture does a really nice job of explaining one of the things that an actuary might do. We have Brian here on the left and Tony on the right. And Brian is 40 years old. He's a heavy smoker. He never exercises. As a job he cleans asbestos, and he has an unhealthy diet. His hobbies include poker cigars and watching television.
And then Tony on the right. Same age-- 40 years old, he's a nonsmoker. He drinks two drinks a week. He exercises five times a week. He's an accountant. He has a healthy diet and his hobbies include Tai Chi, Yoga, and meditation. Now right away we can see, "Okay, well, Tony seems to be a lot more healthy, right-- lead a more healthy lifestyle than Brian." And we see the little blurb in the bottom it says, "I'm an Actuary. Brian and Tony want life insurance. I tell the insurance company what their premiums should cost if the firm wants to make a responsible, sorry, a reasonable profit." Brian's premiums will be considerably higher than Tony's because his risk of premature death is significantly greater.
And that's really in a nutshell what an Actuary would do for a medical insurance company. What skills do Actuaries need? Again, statistics and probability, right? We can see that here. It's like, okay, "What's the likelihood that either Brian or Tony would need the insurance, coding skills, business acumen, knowledge of finance and markets and communication skills?" Again, we're seeing, "Okay, we have our statistical findings and our probability findings, how do we communicate that to other people within the organization or within the business, and then what do we actually do with those results?"
Where do Actuaries work? The most common place for Actuaries to work is an insurance company. But Actuaries can work in other businesses as well as consulting firms and government. And it turns out that the tri-state area that we are in is a hotspot for Actuaries. We can see New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut highlighted here or read it here. If you want further information on becoming an Actuary, you can scan either these QR codes for the Society of Actuaries and the Causality Actuary Society here on the right.
So why choose the University New Haven if you're interested in pursuing a major in Mathematics? The University New Haven is has student-centered active learning pedagogies. We have small classes within those 15 students beyond calculus. There's on-campus employment opportunities, we'll go through a few of those in a few slides. There's research opportunities as faculty and paid tutoring and teaching assistantship positions. We have minors that pair well with our major programs. So there's a Business Analytics minor, Business minor, Management minor, Computer Science, minor Economics, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Professional and Technical Writing. All these pair really well with mathematics and might set you up to go into a specific subset of mathematics that you're really interested in.
At the University of New Haven, you have the opportunity to do some research with faculty. You can see several of our students and two of our faculty members in this picture on the right. Dr. Hussain Al Turkey is one of our faculty as well as Dr. Yu Santi Coda Gota. You can submit papers for publications, which will look really good for you on a graduate school application and present at regional conferences. Here's some examples of student research work. On this slide, we have some information about some of the roles our recent alumni have taken. One of our recent alumni is currently working as a Data Scientist after they pursued a MS degree in Operations Research.
Another student is pursuing a Master's degree in Math Education while working as a high school math teacher. Two other students are also pursuing graduate degrees, one in an MBA program and one is an MS in Mathematics. The final student listed on the slide is a Calculus Assistant to Outlier which is an online educational platform. So you can see a variety of different paths that the students took after graduation.
On-campus employment, one of the reasons to choose the University of New Haven is there are many on-campus employment opportunities through the math department. The first bullet point here mentions tutoring in the Math Zone. The Math Zone is a center on campus that is for introductory math courses. You can also be a Learning Assistant in Calculus One, Two, and Three. Learning Assistants work with students during class and hold office hours to help the students learning experience. I have a couple Learning Assistants working in my classes right now. And the Learning Assistants love it and the students really like to hear from other students right how they've succeeded in the course. You can also be a Tutor at the Center for Learning Resources, which is our on-campus Tutoring Center, or you could be a teaching assistant for a community outreach program. One of those is the All-girls Math Academy and we'll see a picture of that in a couple of slides.
University in New Haven also has a Math and Physics Club. Here's some of the activities the Math and Physics Club has done recently. So is the trip to the New Haven Escape Room, club picnic, and a visit to the New York Hall of Science. Outreach to the community, this is a picture of the All-girls Math Academy program that I mentioned over the summer. And below that we see a picture of an Oregon Code program at a local middle school. On the right, you'll note that the department hosted the 2018 Spring Sectional Conference.
All right, let's try a problem together. This problem is called the "Monty Hall Problem." So Monty Hall hosted a game show with a final round that inspired this question probability, you can select one of the doors and when what's behind the door. Two doors hide goats and the other hides a nice car. You choose an initial door. Montey opens a different door that hides a goat, he offers you a chance to change the door you initially selected, just changing your mind improve your chance of winning. Take a second, pause the video, and try to work out a solution. Okay, what did you say? It turns out that you should have changed your mind? Right, you should switch doors. The chance of winning if you change your mind is two-thirds. And the chance of winning if you don't change your mind is 1/3.
I'm going to use an external source and document camera to quickly do a sketch of that. So we have three doors. Here's two... a car and then two goats behind the other two doors. And that can be right the car can be behind any of the doors. So I'm going to draw this situation three times, right? So the first now I've got the car behind the third door. And let's say first you pick this door. And then they show you one of the goats. Let's make two columns here, one for the outcome if you switch and the other one. And I'll put SW for "switch" and then the other one for if you stay. In this scenario, if you're shown one of the goats, and you switch doors, you will lose. If you stay, you will win.
Of course, this is assuming that you want the car and not the goats. I always get that question for my students is like, "But what if you want the goat instead of the car?" So we assume you want the car. And also if you do want a car and you prefer goats, you can sell the car and probably get many goats for the price of the car. Okay, so assuming that we want the car, if we switch, we lose. And if we say we win. In this situation in this scenario, again, you're picking this door and a goat is shown to you. And if you switch, then you win. And if you stay, then you lose. And this scenario here, if you are shown this goat if you switch because you're going to pick the door right that you're not showing the goat behind. If you switch, you will win. And if you stay, you will lose. So here you can see in the switch side that we look lose one out of three times and we win two out of three times. Right, so this is the win. Here, we lose two out of three times. And we win one out of three times. And so if your odds are better if we switch. If you want to know more, you can read Wikipedia articles about the controversy behind the correct answer and different solutions and how they were worked out.
Together, then we're going to run a simulation and actually do this 1,000 times, a simulation of 1,000 times that we're not actually going to sketch 1,000 times. A simulation of 1,000 times and see what the win and lose rate is under keep your door, stay on your door, and switch. So here is the simulation and we've got a little ad here in the corners. Let me close that. Here are the doors. And let's go ahead and simulate. So run simulation, I'm going to choose 1,000 times and keep the choice at a fast pace. Let's start the simulation. Here it goes goats, cars, goats, cars, you can see as we increase the number of trials that we're getting cars, about a third of the time and goats two-thirds of the time when we kept our door when we stayed and remember that we when we said when we stayed we only one 1/3 of the time that's roughly a third of that showing up here. I'm going to pause the recording and we'll check back in when we get closer to 1,000.
Okay and we're back we are almost at 1,000. So you can see that going up and we can see our percentages of winning loss are still holding about a third wins, two-thirds losses, if we stay, if we don't switch doors, right? And you can see the flip what happened if we did switch stores, and that's just an example of the types of problems that you can start to solve with mathematics, and you can make more informed decisions when you are doing some problem-solving behind those decisions.
Okay, so, one final piece of information I want to give you, which is who to contact with more questions. That would be Dr. Yu Santhi Kota Gota, who is our Department Chair. You saw her on a few slides back, right her, and the trip to New Haven Escape Room, as well as and I didn't think I was going to click this many slides back, right here working with some students on student research. So her email is her email is right here. You can also follow some of our activities at UNH Math Zone and @Astronomy. Thank you for listening and I hope to meet some of you in person soon.