I think I should clarify that I am talking primarily about high school education in the United States when I’m talking about math education. That’s honestly all I can speak to as I took one math class in college. It was called Thinking Mathematically and I got like, a B-. I talk about high school math education because I think it sets the tone for how someone will choose his or her college major and that impacts their choice of career. In general, US math education does not look like the well-rounded curriculum that you speak of. It’s a lot about prep for standardized testing, partly as a result of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act

I’m happy to hear you are having such a great experience with your curriculum! Enjoy it and let it inspire you to continue to learn and grow in your next step after graduation.

I think depends on what you define to be “math” as I am aware that while a lot of universities in North America offer math degrees, most of them are either pure math or finance based in general with nothing in between. There are other fields of mathematics that don’t get taught until the graduate level in most schools. This is contrary to the University of Waterloo where the math education is quite comprehensive and allows undergrads to pursue studies in applied mathematics, combinatorics and optimization, etc. I might have a bias but being a math major at UW, I feel the style of the courses and the materials has allowed me to approach any problem pragmatically and allowed me to think holistically while having an open mind to other possible solutions. It’s not just repetitious crunching: this is a bias that is perpetuated by individuals who do not have any experience being in a math program…that’s the type of stuff that the engineers do.

I think what a lot of technical-based universities miss is the ability to allow students (or they just don’t promote it as well) to combine their math or engineering type degrees with business degrees through minors, joint honours or similar double degree programs. I’ve had the fortunate of getting into the Math/Business program here at Waterloo while also doing a business degree at Laurier as well which has given me the practical basis to apply the theory and my open-approach to courses such as strategic policy, marketing, branding, operations (especially with my focus on optimization and system type mathematics). Yes, most people assume that just because I’m a “mathie” my approach is always analytical and being obssesed with metrics. Not so. My math background has taught me to be logical, to see the big picture when solving a program and to apply whatever tool is appropriate for the situation. That’s math right there. For most people it’s easy to use metrics as a tool to solve an issue because they’re not comfortable working with an approach that is not natural to them..

I feel I’m just ranting here but I think a possible solution is for universities in the future to keep stressing degrees/programs which combine different areas together