A mind for figures

JANICE LOVE, a systems administrator from Leixlip, Co Kildare, spends all her days solving problems. She is a clear and logical thinker. She has to be. She says that a mathematician learns how to approach everything in a methodical, disciplined way, automatically making lists, analysing data and checking results.

"I suppose mathematics is a way of thinking more than anything else," she says. "It's a discipline. You get into a certain mode of doing things."

Last year, using all the powers of computing and compiling, checking and coding which come instinctively to her, Love was able to marshal her organisational skills and plan her wedding day. She also approaches her financial planning, for budgeting and other tasks in this "set way". At this stage she does it "without even thinking".

Her work as a systems administrator for the mathematics department at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, involves making sure that a range of different machines are up and running". She has been here for the past two years, watching over a range of PCs, Unix stations, Next stations as well as a World Wide Web. She patrols her patch, wielding just one or two tools of the trade. She nearly always has a logbook with her to keep notes in. She also has a ready supply of disks in her desk and a screw driver is usually close by.

As well as installing new software, up-dating programmes and watching over the machines, her job also involves teaching a mathematical programme language to first second and third-year students.

"It's great. There's so many different things that I'm working on. The teaching is totally different," she says.

Love finished her double-honours Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and computer science in August 1994. At school in Colaiste Chiarain in Leixlip she liked maths but English was her favourite subject.

"I was conscientious. I wouldn't have been up there with the swots. I would have been somewhere in the middle," she says. She did pass maths in her Leaving Cert, and says that doing first-year maths at university was "not all that difficult" because she had covered most of the course at school.

"When you're doing a science degree you need mathematics in all of your subjects. If you don't have it you'll find yourself at a loss. You have to understand it," she says.

"I came into Maynooth to do a science degree. After two years I decided to go into mathematics." Students, she explains, do four subjects in first year and this gave her a chance to find out what area she would most like to pursue.

She did biology, chemistry, maths and computer science in first year. By third year she had dropped biology and chemistry. Only three students studied honours computer science in Love's final year. Only two graduated with honours, Love being one of the two.

"It's tough enough," she says. After working for a month in the computer science department at the college, she got a job in the mathematics department. The other graduate got a job with Gateway 2000.

There were about nine graduates of the honours maths class in Love's final year. The majority of these have gone on to do postgraduate work. This may be an option for Love in the future but at the moment she is busy and "the work is challenging".