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As a B-school prof, I followed a few consulting opportunities. Results: (1) Not always easy to get paid. (2) Medicine and some fields of engineering are recognized and accepted professions where both the professional and the customer know something about what to expect. Less so for applied math. In simple terms, so far applied math is not yet much of a profession. (3) Really, all the business came via the B-school. But the academic, research university culture of the B-school regarded any consulting or applied work as neglect of research or teaching. (4) Somewhere have to get past the norm that a pure/applied math Ph.D. should not make money enough to buy a house and support a family. A lot of people with no graduate degrees, in nice houses, with late model cars, doing well supporting a family, are laughing at how smart math Ph.D.'s are. And, if business person X meets a pure/applied math Ph.D., e.g., in just a business meeting, person X can resent that the Ph.D. may know some technical material they, person X, does not know and that might be important for the business of X. A person with cancer does not resent the knowledge about cancer held by an MD treating that person for their cancer. (5) Broadly, a medical school is clinical, sees patients, and the profs, MDs, are expected to continue to practice their profession, that is, continue to see patients. Again, the usual research university math/science culture would regard the clinical work as neglect of research or teaching, but, really, medicine is one of the most active and productive fields for research. (6) At times there are opportunities, with eager, well funded customers, for computing with some applied math in US national security around DC. To be blunt, pure/applied math in the research universities gets funded nearly only by the US federal government and for basically one reason, US national security, and because of some of history, cryptography and The Bomb, with some respect for applications of antenna theory. (7) My view is that some guy in a big truck/little truck business -- buy from a few big trucks, sell from lots of little trucks -- is right: That is, have a business, an actual business, with products and/or services, customers, revenue, and earnings. For more, now, there may be good businesses based on computing and the Internet, for more than just Intel, AMD, Cisco, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. And some pure/applied math somewhere in such a business, likely programmed and buried somewhere in the infrastructure, might be a crucial advantage. Else, what are we racing toward, a few really big companies making robots and everyone else with nothing to do? |
If I had the same feeling about a Java consultant I know about how and where to find one, how to present the problem and what form their solution might take.
I think spreading the word about how to do the same with an applied mathematics consultant would be very useful in expanding the market.