Choosing A Math Or Physics Career: Do Teachers Or Industry Engineers Do More Hand Calculations?
Last Tuesday, I was wiping whiteboard smudges off my hands after school, half a chocolate granola bar melting next to my stack of ungraded physics quizzes, when senior Javi leaned in the doorframe of my classroom. He’d been coming in once a week for extra practice on AP Calc BC, and his spiral notebook was crammed with full problem sets he’d done outside of class, margins filled with extra derivative practice just because he liked how the steps fit together. He twisted his backpack strap and asked the question I’ve gotten three times in the last year from STEM-loving seniors: Would you say math and physics teachers or industry engineers do more calculations by hand? I’m trying to pick a career that fits what I actually love doing.
Javi told me he’d done a two-week internship at a local civil engineering firm the previous summer. He’d brought his notebook every day, sharpened a handful of pencils before he arrived, ready to work through problems. After the first week, he realized almost no one was sitting down to do full calculations by hand. Everyone pulled up pre-built spreadsheets, adjusted a couple of input numbers, ran a simulation in CAD, and called it a day. His supervisor told him the software was accurate enough that hand calculations were only for quick sanity checks. Javi said it felt like he’d been cheated out of the part of the subject he actually enjoyed.
I told him I’d thought about this question a lot, because my older brother Mike is a mechanical engineer who designs HVAC systems for commercial buildings, so I texted him that night to ask how much time he spends doing hand calcs on a typical day. We talked about it over the weekend, when we were grilling hot dogs for our kids’ soccer team get-together. Mike laughed and said maybe 10 to 15 minutes total, on a really busy day. He said when he was in college, he spent hours every week working through hand calcs for problem sets, so he assumed that’s what his day-to-day job would be. Now, the only time he pulls out a pencil is when a simulation spits out a number that doesn’t make sense—like a cooling load that’s twice what he expects—and he does a quick back-of-the-envelope check to see if someone input the wrong building square footage. That’s it.
Compare that to my job, as a high school physics and pre-calculus teacher. Let’s add it up: I work through at least four to five full example problems from start to finish on the whiteboard every day, that’s an hour and a half of hand calculations right there. Before I give any quiz or test, I work through every problem by hand myself to make sure the numbers add up and the difficulty is right, that’s another 20 to 30 minutes a day. When students come in with questions after class, I work through their problem step by step with them by hand, that’s another 15 to 30 minutes. Add it all up, that’s two to three hours of hand calculations every single work day, just as part of the regular job. That’s a huge gap compared to the 10 minutes a day most entry to mid-level industry engineers see.
I talk to a lot of parents who have kids that love doing math or physics by hand, and they always wonder how to help their kid sort through what career will actually make them happy. A lot of people just tell kids “if you like STEM, be an engineer” without stopping to ask what part of STEM they actually love. One concrete thing I tell parents to try is ask their kid this specific question: When do you enjoy doing calculations the most? If your kid says they love working through a whole problem from start to finish, showing every step, and getting that quiet satisfaction when the final number lines up just right, that’s the part of the work teachers get to do every day. If your kid says they only like doing quick calculations to figure out a real thing they’re building or fixing, that’s exactly the kind of hand calcs most engineers do.
Another small, concrete step parents can suggest is a half-day shadow in both fields, and ask your kid to count how much time the person spends writing calculations out by hand. Javi shadowed me for a free period a week after he first asked the question, and he counted that I did almost an hour and a half of hand calcs just in that one block. He then shadowed the same civil engineer he interned with a month later, and counted less than 10 minutes of hand calcs the entire eight-hour day. That told him more than any college brochure or career quiz ever could.
Of course, there are exceptions. Some niche engineering roles, like R&D for new aerospace technology or small consulting firms that build custom one-off parts, will have more hand calcs. And some full-time research professors at four-year colleges spend less time doing hand calcs than K-12 or community college teachers, since most of their work is running computer models. But for the vast majority of standard roles, the gap is big and consistent.
Last week, Javi stopped by my room to drop off a copy of his college acceptance to the state’s secondary math and physics education program, though he’s still waiting on a response from the engineering program he applied to out of state. He said right now, he’s leaning towards teaching, because it’s the only path he’s seen that gives him enough of the thing that made him fall in love with the subject in the first place: time to work through full calculations by hand, and share that satisfaction when every step lines up just right. He might change his mind once he starts college, and that’s fine. For now, he’s got enough information to make a choice that feels right for him, which is all any of us can ask for.
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