Nonacademic careers, internships, and undergraduate research

Abstract

The benefits for students who do undergraduate research are mainly thought of in terms of graduate school success and opportunities for future careers as professors. These benefits also help students who go into business, industry, or government. Faculty mentors are often unaware of careers and internships in business, industry, or government. In this paper, some of these opportunities will be presented so that professors can better direct students to them as they are mentoring students. Much of this information has been obtained while organizing the summer internship program at Brigham Young University’s Department of Mathematics, the “Careers in Math” speaker series funded by NSF grant DUE-1019594, and our academic-year undergraduate research program, which involves about 75 mathematics majors a year in original research.