Would anyone on here be willing to fill out these questions if your job uses math on a daily basis? 10 pts!?

[BeYourself]

Ok, I have a project for school that I have to interview someone who uses math for there job a daily basis and I don't have the time to go somewhere and interview someone.

So if you could, could you please just answer these questions? I promise I will give 10 points to the person who fills them all out with good answers! Thank you soooooo much! You have no idea how much this is appreciated.

Interview questions:

Name of person being interviewed:____________________________…
Name of the company he/she works for:____________________________________…

School Questions:

What's your educational background? (where did you go to school?)
______________________________________…
Were you a good student?_________________________(what was your GPA?) _______
When you were in school, did you think you would be doing this particular job?
______________________________________…
(If interviewee has college degree, ask him/her what their degree or major was in)
______________________________________…
Think back to the math classes you had in school... did the concepts you learned in school help you with this job or did you have to learn those concepts after you were hired?
______________________________________…
Knowing what you know today, if you could go back in time ... would you do anything different in school?
______________________________________…

Job Questions:

What are your job responsibilities?
______________________________________…
How does math play a role in those responsibilities?
______________________________________…
What happens if you make a math error in your calculations? ________________________________________…
Could someone with very poor math skills do your job?
______________________________________…
Do you think math plays an important role in almost all jobs? ________________________________________…
Do you think students today realize how important good math skills are later in life?
______________________________________…
Anything else you would like to add?
______________________________________…

[Texas]

Name: Kevin Little, works for Blue Shield of Calif
Went to Pomona College, Major is B.A. in Mathematics, Minor in Statistics.
Was I a good student? yes and no, I did well in some classes and nearly failed others. I discovered that "pure theory" was a difficult path for me to follow and I stuck with "applied math", and found Statistics to be an area that I could identify well with and follow. GPA: around a B average. I graduated in 1987 so I don't remember an exact number.
When I was in school, I presumed I would be doing some sort of computer job, but I had no precise idea exactly what. I hoped to make money designing games maybe.
Did the concepts I learned in school help me? Statistics such as MTBF and understanding the probability of failure increases as more redundant drives are added to a storage array is highly useful to know in business of data continuity and disaster recovery.
If I could go back in time... I wish I had learned more HISTORY, those were some of the classes that I missed because I was focused on the math and computer stuff that I *thought* was important. What I think of later is that it is most important to learn from the failures of others, to understand history and not repeat the mistakes we may learn from, and that is for mathematics or anything else.

Job responsibility: Oracle Database Administrator is my title, and responsibility includes setup of dataabases, configuration for optimal balance of performance and resilience for backup and recovery, and of course also in line with legal mandates and best practices and establishing and maintaining standards for DBA team to share and follow, to collect backup and recovery and performance statistics, and to keep management informed of our system effectiveness, and also collect info that helps show when we need more storage, CPU upgrades or other predictive capacity planning metrics. Yup that is all Math!

Someone who is not good at math might not understand that when the disk is 100% full, the database stops running. Or that if it is 25% full one year, 50% full the next year and 75% full the year after that, then we could do a linear projection that it will be full the next year if we don't do something to anticipate.

There are some types of jobs that are technical and behind the scenes, like IT computer jobs where math is "obviously" dominant skill. And there are more people oriented jobs like customer service and sales, and I work with and support people in the more "people oriented" jobs, but then the sales guys are very aware of their commissions, and customer support is aware of average talk time and how many calls per day they are handling, and everyone has some sort of metrics they are trying to meet or exceed, mathematics is used to measure productivity for almost every type of position, even the farmer how many bushels do you have to sell, how many acres to yield? How many days do you need to rent that Combine? There is no job so simple you never need math.

I hope students understand the importance of math. I see more and more computer geek types on facebook and various places socially. Yet also I worry that computers and graphic calculators make math "so easy" that kids don't think so much about it, they take it for granted, and then when someone runs a program that computes YOUR metrics, and something is wrong, do you know enough to debate it, to calculate the correct result and be confident that you can make your point?

What I learn when I study statistics is that 66% of all statistics reported in the media are lies. Up to you whether you decide that this statement is one of those lies!