Economics and Business are also STEM fields

Being a scientist, married to a scientist, affiliated with a college with a strong engineering program, having a sister and father with engineering backgrounds and other relatives in health fields and computing, and being a follower of science Twitter, my bias is I perceive people studying or with careers in STEM fields as those working in science, medicine, computing/IT, technology, and engineering. However, it became clear to me at my recent high school reunion that areas of business and economics are very quantitative and should not be forgotten in considering what is a STEM discipline or career. 

At the reunion, I saw for the first time in decades, a classmate who sat next to me in AP Calculus senior year in high school. This brilliant young man would sometimes flatter me by asking to borrow my homework to copy right before class, not because he wasn’t smart, but because he just hadn’t done it. He went to MIT, majoring in Math, and then got a Master’s in Finance and Information Systems from MIT’s Sloan School of Business. He has had a very successful career in finance.

Likewise, my engineering-major, accounting-minor sister used her accounting training at major business consulting firms and Fortune 500 companies, notably working in 1998-99 on Y2K issues of amending accounting and inventory code from two-digit-year designators to four-digit. My hairdresser’s college-math-major daughter has gone into market analysis, a job the hairdresser says was predicated on having a math degree. Have these individuals left science or math behind, “leaked” out of the STEM pipeline post-graduation? Certainly not.

Quantitative analysis of price futures: US crude oil commodity price forecast (West Texas Intermediate benchmark) with confidence intervals (Energy Information Administration).

In my field of Earth Sciences, there is a variety of mathematical applications, including statistics, used among subdisciplines. Especially, but not exclusively, geophysics, climate modeling, and hydrology, have practitioners who are mathematicians applying their skills to earth problems. These mathematicians can easily move between topics and careers where math is a tool. During a conference on large meteorite impacts in 2008, one conference attendee who did modeling of effects of impacts on planetary surfaces mentioned to me that he was considering getting a job in business rather than academia. From my doctoral alma mater, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, it has been noted that being “highly skilled at analyzing complex data, they [Lamont geophysicists] had figured out they could make a lot more money crunching stock prices for Wall Street than plotting earthquakes.” Tragically, Weibin Wang (Ph.D. 1994), who had studied earthquake mechanics, was working as a senior program analyst for financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center when he lost his life on September 11, 2001. 

Right now we are in another long season of US electoral obsessiveness with daily reporting of statistics in the form of polling data. The fine print at the bottom of some polling result graphics on television include the sample size (number of people surveyed) and the margin of error in the form of the standard deviation. We should be reminded that “pollster” can be another STEM career, many pollsters having either a psychology or statistics background.

MSNBC Iowa polling data graphic from June 2019, showing at bottom the sample size (people polled) and MOE (margin of error).