Is there a Career combining Art (the Fine Art kind) and Math (the Calculus kind)?
I've always loved fine art with all kind of mediums, (oil paint, charcoal, soft pastels, etc) as well as math (calculus has been the best so far), but I'm not interested in engineering or the other careers (graphic design, architecture) that keep being mentioned with these two topics. I don't find science interesting and while I can easily pass computer programming it also isn't something I can see myself doing.
I know I'm being super difficult with this description, but does anyone have any ideas of a possible future career?
#art #math #career #college
2 answers
Greg’s Answer
While there are some folks doing math-inspired art (e.g., Anton Sherwood or Bathsheba Sculpture), it's not a big market, so I would not recommend it as a first choice. But there's some fascinating stuff out there, and it might inform your choices of the next math courses you take.
A much better bet in terms of employability (and, hopefully, personal enjoyment) is data visualization, especially scientific visualization. The age of Big Data is here (though we'll look back on today's "big" data in 10 years and laugh), and being able to make sense of the deluge increasingly means using clever visualizations to present multidimensional data (e.g., a 3D model with color, transparency, and animation => 5 dimensions of data at once, perhaps 6 if a 3D grid of arrows/vectors is also overlaid). Science often has the coolest data (e.g., see the video of the Illustris Simulation or the Cosmography of the Local Universe video) but not always the best funding. :-/ There are plenty of companies working with big data, however (my own, LinkedIn, as well as Google, IBM, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Netflix, most of the large biotech/pharmacology ones, etc.), and they tend to pay better.
Greg recommends the following next steps:
Ken’s Answer
Congratulations on being interested in finding the right career to follow.. It takes a special person to enter into a specific career field and meet the demands which that career area presents. The first step is to get to know yourself to see if you share the personality traits which make one successful in that area. The next step is doing networking to meet and talk to and possibly shadow people doing what you might think that you want to do to see if this is something that you really want to do, as a career area could look much different on the inside than it looks from the outside. When I was doing college recruiting, I encountered too many students, who skipped these important steps, and ended up in a career/job for which they were ill suited.
Ken recommends the following next steps: