The author describes her career development from mathematics instructor to director of institutional research at a large community college. She discusses the impact of mathematics on her career, illustrates her present job by describing three recently completed research projects, and strongly recommends that mathematics instructors encourage some of their students to consider careers which use mathematics as a tool. Her descriptions of institutional research projects to determine demographic characteristics of the community college area, local labor market needs, and local consumer market preferences would be useful to any institutional researcher. Appendices include the charts, tables and narrative findings that resulted from her research on demography, as well as complete mathematical formulas for projecting populations through modified cohort procedures, two-point and multiple-point linear regression, and two-point and multiple-point logistic curves. (DC)