My friend Alex recently received his Master’s Degree in math from Harvard but was having trouble finding a job. He spent the last four months looking and was running low on rent money. He decided to work weekends at the McDonalds by his house while he looked for a job during the week.
After Alex handed in his employment application, the manager told Alex that he wasn’t qualified.
“Not qualified? But I’ve got a Master’s degree in Math from Harvard!”
The McDonald’s manager shrugged: All of our mathematicians have PhDs.
A mathematics student had just finished his Ph.D. in Princeton, and he was looking for jobs. After a year with no success, he finally landed a job with the zoo as a zookeeper. One day, the bear in the zoo died. The zoo was facing the same financial crisis as the universities, and so they could not afford to buy another bear. So they asked the student to dress up in a bear costume and pretend that he was a bear. The salary they offered was definitely an increase, and so he took this job. He was put into a cage, and with time he became very good at imitating a bear.
However, he had one worry. The bars between his cage and the next cage were loose. And in the next cage was a very ferocious looking lion. One day, his worst fears were realized, and the bar broke loose. The lion jumped through the bars, and ran up to the student. Extending his paw, the lion exclaimed, “Hi, I’m Phil, a physics major from Stanford.â€
Source: http://komplexify.com/epsilon/2008/11/28/math-degrees/