Vu Thai Pham
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What he does:
- He is a software development engineer at Microsoft. More specficially, he works on the SQL Server Build Team. He develops and maintains the build process and its tools.
- Vu Thai started as a contractor at Microsoft, working in this capacity for about four months, and then later moved into a full-time position.
Math on the job:
- He doesn't specifically use mathematics, but does use the analytical skills acquired through the study of mathematics. This helps him to write code and solve problems. The real world is about solving problems that your employer has. You are never going to be given a problem like the ones from your tests in college. Instead, you will be presented with a problem and you will be responsible for finding a solution.
Vu Thai's background:
- Vu Thai graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Applied and Computational Mathematical Sciences (ACMS), Summer 2006.
- Vu says he wanted to study Computer Science, but when he didn't get into the program, he ended up majoring in Economics. About half way through this program, he did some research on salaries and realized that it may be hard to raise a family on the salaries he was seeing for someone with a BS in Economics. . After looking around at other majors, he settled on the ACMS program. He thought he was terrible at math, but wanted to try to overcome this. So he started working on the Mathematical Economics pathway in the ACMS program.
- It turned out that he wasn't so bad at math afterall. He was just lacking some of the basic skills that he should have learned in middle school. Algebra mostly, because calculus isn't all that hard, but algebra required getting the problem in the right form, which can be very challenging. So he struggled in the first few classes, but ended up pulling it altogether in the end.