I've posted this in comments a few times, may deserve its own thread:
I have a friend that is a project leader at a very prominent engineering firm. They run internships and used to take applicants from Harvard, MIT, and more local state schools. Over the past decade or so they have completely dropped the Harvard & MIT students. He said they're useless. Even in these STEM fields they don't teach the students how to do actual engineering. Instead, the students started coming in and demanding to do projects on "racism in engineering" and garbage like that. They refused to do the projects that they were brought in to do, and whatever basic engineering tasks they were assigned to do, they fucked up. We're talking extremely basic stuff here. Everyone got tired of hearing about 'patriarchy' and 'race theory', so they took all the internship slots and started giving them to the state school kids that probably come from working-class backgrounds. Those kids actually had work-ethic and knew what they should.
I would love to join in that venture. I have a software/teaching background.
Shut up and take my money!! Seriously, put your fund-me here and many like me would pitch in. Also consider interfaces with older systems- many big firms have very old applications with data in all kinds of interesting formats, they foolishly lose the keepers and end up in a jam. The kind they'll pay big money to be rescued from
Some higher math can definitely help with some projects, but if we're just trying to get controls on a screen and data into/out of a repository, you are right
"while the latter is discrete and bumpy" - Integral, one might say:)
I'm a software engineer now but was once considered to have reasonable aptitude for math
second reply; I enjoyed proofs more than anything else in Geometry and Trig. Always fun
I'd love to do this after I retire from teaching, especially the no calculus part. I never want to deal with it again.