Posted on 12/29/2021 7:06:27 PM PST by DUMBGRUNT
Insurers need experts to calculate risk. Among those number-crunchers’ riskiest endeavors are the tortuous exams for credentials.
Kaylee Cohen studied two months for an actuarial exam last year—then failed it. She dreaded telling the actuaries at the insurance company where she was interning that she had flunked.
“But when I told them, they said, ‘Oh yeah, I failed that one too,’ ” says the 23-year-old student at Montreal’s Concordia University. “It made me feel so much better knowing everybody else was in the same shoes.” She finally passed that exam and now has several more to go for an actuarial credential.
There is no limit to how many times a candidate can take the tests. It took one man 50 years to become a Fellow, says Stuart Klugman, an official at the society. The society says a candidate typically takes seven to 10 years to become a Fellow. They must pass 10 exams plus other coursework and requirements.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
“In 30 years in insurance, I know ONE actuary who was fun.”
Did you work on the life side or PC side? The life side is kind of boring. People die fairly predictively. Once in a while something somewhat new like AIDs or Covid comes along, but even then the change in underlying mortality is fairly predictable.
Actuaries are a different breed.
- smoked dope.
- studied for his actuary exam.
- listened to David Frye records and did adequate impersonations of David Frye impersonating others.
I heard second hand that he made it as an actuary and cleaned up with $$$$ as they are exceedingly well paid.
So yeah.
Just watched a movie about Tommy the other night with a lot of interviews with the band members. One forgets what a cohesive story and project that was.
A lot of it has to do with building the appropriate equation out of the information given. The first sentence in the example brings a question to my mind - “exponentially distributed with a mean of 2 years...” I can figure out a mean of 2 years, but the exponentially distributed would give me pause.
I suppose that if you’re in the field, there’s a typical standard exponential distribution (like a bell curve and standard deviations and all that), and one would know that just as my mother knew the difference between a peck of strawberries and a quart of strawberries.
These credentialing schemes have the effect of maintaining high salaries. I’m not saying they’re not needed, but that is the effect.
I’m going to pick B. They say that when you don’t know the answer, you should pick C and you have a greater chance of getting right answer than any other letter choice.
But in my experience, B more often turned out to be the right answer.
A Ph.D., I will be the first to admit, is often a bullsheet degree. Hence, holders of one know bullsheet when they see it.
I say we need to have an Olympics of the Mind type competition between actuaries and epidemiologists.
i passed the first two exams with no problem. It was the interview I couldn’t pass.
I thought there were quite a few personality questions in the interviews: what was your most satisfying experience, biggest disappointment, what do you do for fun, etc.
Now interviews for other jobs were like that too - so I don’t know that you need more personality than anywhere else - but they were definitely looking for personality traits that I didn’t have.
Hmm. I thought the same thing when I saw this question.
If you learn and understand the standard approaches to these types of questions, it might not be that hard.
Maybe someday when I am done trying to figure out how we get out of this plandemic, I’ll take an intro course in actuarial science for laughs.
The answer is D.
“with mean 2 years. “
with a mean life of 2 years?
In the 1990’s the Actuaries regularly had the best jobs in terms of emotional and financial security. Yes, everyone needs Actuaries. Accountants are super talented, too.
P&C...property.
not like work comp- somethings can’t be made up!
You lucky stiff. You can keep warm for almost a whole night with a good lump of coal.
Everyone in IT agreed that it was much better for the future of humanity that actuaries never wrote their own code. Invariably, bizarre and unreadable programs resulted.
One of the AVP’s in the actuarial department took a liking to me, and asked my manager if I would be interested in taking the actuarial exams. I gently sidestepped that - and ended up making more money in IT a few short years later during the dot com boom than I ever would have as an insurance company actuary. Those were the good old days… :)
The probability of X in the exponential distribution is L * exp (-L*X), where the average = 1 / L. In this problem, L = 0.5.
Thus, the first probability is 0.5 * exp (-(0.5*1)) = 0.3033 and the second probability is 0.5 * exp (-(0.5*2)) = 0.1839.
The first expected payoff is 0.3033*$200 or $60.65 and the second payoff is 0.1839*$100 or $18.39.
The sum of the payoffs is $79.04. That payoff for 100 printers is $7,904.
Since I'm (clearly) not an actuary, I'll round to the closest and guess C.
I predict that theses actuary positions are high candidates for AI replacement.
I knew the answer intuitively, but just wanted to see if you could work the problem. We’ll done, my FRiend
Yeh, I could pass the exams, but not get a job. They would have 4-hour interviews talking to different people. They seemed to be looking for someone who was smooth and a fast talker.
I was interested in casualty actuarial work, because I did not want to work with life contingencies. However, casualty actuaries seem to make up rate filings they know will be disapproved and them make changes which get approved after endless discussion with the Insurance Department, but mainly someone gets paid off. It requires someone who is a slick talker and writer and can play with figures. You need to be nerdy in a way, but it requires some skills of a salesman.
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