[whiterknight]

You’re attributing these life challenges to your STEM PhD speciality?

I am sensitive to your hardship, but optimization has nothing to do with it. People are succeeding with bachelor’s degrees in Latin.

[graycat]

The point of the post is that in my long experience there was not much about optimization that in any significant practical career sense was "applied", i.e., no jobs even to keep one from living on the streets, far from a career to buy a house and support a family.

The point about my Ph.D. with a lot in optimization is that I was quite well qualified in the field, but even with all those qualifications "applied" was not real, i.e., there just was nothing like a career in optimization applications.

Can suspect that, yes, "Ph.D." did seriously damage all career prospects, optimization, math, even computing.

The successes I did have were in computing. At the time the math was a small aid.

Did get paid for some work in applied optimization on some military problems. Looking back, there was some stranger in the office eager to discuss the weather, etc. with me. Maybe I said the wrong things about some of the US foreign wars, and then the stranger was gone. Might have been some high end military job interview that needed only gung ho attitudes toward foreign policy.

Delicate political situation, and I was oblivious about politics. Like, "stick to two subjects, the weather and everyone's health" and avoid "sex, politics, and religion".

Early on while I was in a grad program teaching math, some recruiters came from DC desperate for anyone with some math/physics education. I interviewed: Got a offer and took a job right away. Soon bought a new car and got married.

In those days, around DC, to get a job, just look in the WaPo, apply, go on the interview, show some knowledge of some of computing, get an offer, compare a few offers, with, say, a 15% raise, and accept one -- worked great. For a while, at GE time sharing national HQ, was the main guy for the applied math library, e.g., the FFT, regression analysis. Later a good background in "applied" optimization, worthless.

[richrichie]

You should have tried wall street. At this point they are the real supporters of mathematicians. We had optimization problems everywhere and had physics PhDs reinventing mathematical algorithms and keeping things “proprietary”. Right now i work in a startup that essentially writes optimization routines for portfolio problems.

I will blame your phd advisor.

[whiterknight]

Sounds like you opened up the newspaper and scanned for “mathematician”. Leveraging phd research into a great job is a tough. Re-skilling into a normie engineer/technician/analyst, is not.

My point is not to criticize your job hunting skills, it’s to suggest that this an undue psychological burden in your life and is perhaps masking other causes and personal challenges.