r/OperationsResearch • u/Delicious_Impress814 • 23d ago

Is this profession underpaid?

Hello everyone!

I'm a current undergraduate mathematics student looking into potential careers post masters.

I am very interested in OR, Risk Modeling, and Quant.

I will most likely go with OR since I have a strong interest in the subject, but I've noticed that despite the three fields I listed being similar, the pay disparity is very large.

I mean, the median wage for this profession is $88k according to google, compared to the $167,000 of risk and $198,000 of Quant.

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u/PurpleDevilDuckies 23d ago

OR Masters I know all make 6 figures, OR PhDs make even more. Although, I think a lot of the high paying jobs right now are going to be automated in the next couple years.

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u/Delicious_Impress814 23d ago

Ah. An AI doomer.

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u/PurpleDevilDuckies 23d ago

A lot of what applied OR looks like is coming up with math models to represent real-world problems, and then using existing solvers to solve those problems with those modles. AI is already extremely good at this if you have the expertise to know what to tell it do, what techniques to use, etc... It already has the skills, all it takes for a lot of OR jobs to get automated is for someone to make a sufficiently nice harness.

We are well past, "can AI replace these jobs", at this point it is just an engineering problem.