English is one thing, but I certainly wouldn’t think of a math degree as being impractical. I’ve actually seen that people with math degrees generally earn fairly impressive salaries, comparable to engineers and even higher than people with physics degrees. People with math degrees can work in encryption, information technology, and accounting/finance/economics. Those who work in a finance-related field would, of course, be paid quite well. It’s kind of like the situation with chemistry and pharmacology – probably one of the best-paying jobs in these fields is as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company. (I went to a job fair a while ago with a few major pharmaceutical companies and some generic pharmas, and most of the people there were Ph.D. chemists applying for sales rep positions.)
Well, my Dad has a PHD in math and he did computer programming, designed a rocket or a missle, and nuclear reactor saftey research.
My Mom, who has a Masters in English, Summa Cum Laude, was a teacher and a secretary.
I grew up around a lot of PHDs. The physics people generally stayed in physics of some sort. The English and humanities people generally ended up doing administrative work or teaching. The math people tended to have a lot of different type jobs, like programming, astronomy, physics and engineering.
If you get a PHD in math you can pretty much go into any hard science as it is all math. Might take a while to get into it but the tools are already there. The financial world also needs math people.
Slee