I was born in 1988 in Kansas City, Missouri, and attended Archbishop O'Hara high school where I played basketball and was a member of the team that won a state championship. After graduation I attended Florida A & M University in Tallahassee, Florida where I majored in chemical engineering. I then transferred to Columbia College in Sonora, California to play basketball collegiately. After earning a degree in business I won a scholarship to play basketball at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada where I changed my major to mathematics. After our coach left the team, I entered UMKC in 2013 to finish my studies in mathematics.
Many people don't know that a degree in mathematics opens a lot of doors when it comes to choosing a career. I feel that mathematics opens your world to a different way of thinking. I like the fact that mathematics is used in other fields to solve important problems. I chose to go to UMKC because I wanted to be near home and I felt this university was my best choice when it came to education and cost. The Math Department professors are very helpful, the graduate students have a lot of insight and the classes are challenging, yet very interesting. If ever you need a professor at UMKC it is never extremely hard to reach them and schedule a meeting to get help. I have even emailed a few professors over the weekend and would get replies back the same day. They want to see every student be successful.
In 2014 we created the Math Club to provide students the opportunity to form relations with like-minded individuals. Math Club isn't closed to only math majors but to anyone with an interest in mathematics. The Math Club also gives our students the opportunity to kick back, take a break from studies and have some fun, as well as host events like Pi Day, movie nights, social events and the list goes on. The "Convergence" is a room that gives math majors their own spot to hang out. You can catch people in there studying hard for tests or working on homework, or relaxing and just chatting it up.
I currently work at Cerner in Kansas City as a Business Consultant. It took me a couple of months to find a job but that's not bad at all. I feel that the job market for math majors is very vast. Math majors are sought after because we are problem solvers, we're analytical and good with numbers. On top of that being that we obtained a degree in math, employers tend to believe we can easily pick up on any task assigned to us because the job will most likely not be anywhere near as hard as any math class we have taken.
[While at UMKC, Keith presented a poster "Kansas City Gang Violence: A Mathematical Solution for a Troubling Problem" for University
Research Day at the Capitol of Missouri, Jefferson City, in March 2015. He was also part of a team that jointly presented a similar poster "Kansas City Gang Membership: Contemporary Problems, Mathematical Solutions" at the UMKC SEARCH Symposium.]
Keith Robinson