Year 12 exams: Surprising career possibilities from maths, the school subject many find annoying

Dr Kate Helmstedt has just returned from Antarctica, where she used mathematical models to analyse samples of the environment to advise on what needs to be done to better protect the ecosystem from the effects of climate change.

“It was amazing, very beautiful. As cold as they say, as vast as they say, surprisingly not as quiet as they say,” she tells 9honey.

“I’ve been working on modelling, using maths to understand Antarctic systems for about five years now.

READ MORE: Macca’s confirms major product change in Australia

“I work with a lot of Antarctic scientists who go down all the time.”

In this role, along with her work in safeguarding The Great Barrier Reef, Dr Helmstedt uses mathematics to solve urgent environmental crises – something many Aussies who grew up hating maths class would likely find hard to believe.

“When I was in high school, I knew that I loved maths. I knew that I liked solving little puzzles,” she says.

READ MORE: ‘Expiration date’: Megan Fox’s powerful comments after pregnancy

“I like the creative side of maths, more than just doing sums and practising things over and over again.”

Dr Helmstedt says it never occurred to her, as is the case with many high school students, that there could be actual jobs that come out of maths.

“When I went to university I dabbled a little bit in other sciences, a little bit in engineering, a little bit in political science, because I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do,” she recalls.

“Then I realised, ‘Hey, maybe I should just study this thing that I love even though there’s probably no jobs in it’.”

Once she started studying maths exclusively, she never looked back, and learned about all the jobs available in her chosen field.

“There’s a few different categories of jobs,” she says.

“First of all, there’s getting jobs in companies that do mathematics. What they do is they consult out into real-world problems … they need to tackle these using mathematics.”

Examples of this is the NBN (National Broadband Network) roll out in Australia, and Queensland Rail.

“If we think about Queensland Rail, for example, they have mathematicians look at modelling, getting the trains to run on time,” Dr Helmstedt explains.

This makes for a diverse range of career options for mathematicians, across business, ecology, business, art and fashion.

”Now, more than ever, everything runs on computers, everything runs on data, everything runs on these predictive models. People really want to understand [and] be able to see what has happened in the past and understand how that might influence what happens in the future,” she says.

“And that’s what maths is really good at, and that’s why I feel it’s valuable in the business world.”

Dr Helmstedt’s degree has also taken her all around the world.

Can you answer these Year 12 exams questions?

After she finished her undergraduate degree, she completed her PhD and moved to California for a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Berkeley in a research role.

For a daily dose of 9honey, subscribe to our newsletter here.

After California, she travelled back home and accepted a role at QUT (Queensland University of Technology) as a lecturer, where she built a team that specalised in Applied Mathematical Ecology.

This led her to her work in Antarctica.

“One of the big projects that we work on at the moment is understanding the current and future ecosystem state of Antarctica,” she says.

“Understanding where species are in Antarctica, what they’re doing, how healthy and workable those ecosystems are right now, and also trying to understand how those might change with climate change.

READ MORE: The pillows perfect for side-sleepers

“What my group really focuses on is trying to understand those systems so that we can design better management of them.”

Dr Helmstedt is also focused on building the “pipeline of women into mathematical sciences”.

“We know that girls … in primary school and high school, they like maths,” she says.

“It’s not that they don’t like maths, it’s that it’s perceived in certain ways that I think are not correct, and therefore little girls maybe don’t see themselves going into these types of jobs.

“We are seeing improvements, but it’s slow … but we’re seeing attitudes changing a lot.”

FOLLOW US ON WHATSAPP HERE: Stay across all the latest in celebrity, lifestyle and opinion via our WhatsApp channel. No comments, no algorithm and nobody can see your private details.