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Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

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Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#121

Post by onion2k »

p33p wrote: post #57

As an actuary, I can not recommend it to anyone with a technical background. I have degrees in mathematics and actuarial science, and I consider my actuarial science degree completely worthless. A mathematics and/or computer science degree will teach you more in terms of how to think than anyone with an actuarial science degree. If you’d like to take a major where your professors literally teach to the exam/test, the…

As the brother of an actuary, one of my favourite jokes is "Actuaries are people who tried accountancy but found it too exciting." :)

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#122

Post by TangoTrotFox »

vostok wrote: post #65
rm999 wrote: post #5

Full dataset is here: https://www.scribd.com/document/388081338/BANKRATE-Most-Valu... For those of you who are wondering, Computer Engineering is 14th, "Mathematics and Computer Science" is 23rd and Computer Science is 30th. If I had to guess, CS has a wider income distribution than many of the higher ranking degrees, which are dominated by engineering degrees (many of which have lower unemployment rates too). The no…

I'm very surprised that economics and finance are higher than computer science. I would have expected that corporate finance jobs would have brought the average below that of CS.

The value of any degree is always going to be measured against supply and demand. There has been a huge push to get more people into computer science, thus increasing the supply beyond the rate of demand. Declining wages would be the logical conclusion (and motivation) for this.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#123

Post by Bootvis »

I’m an actuary (not of the qualified variety) and don’t share the observations made in most of the comments here:

- I get to spend most of the time in R working on cash flow modeling;

- We get to use a lot of data which makes for interesting challenges;

- I get a say in how we solve problems IT wise;

- We need to understand the business to do our own modeling correctly;

- Pay isn’t that great.

AMA

P.S. I’m in Europe

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#124

Post by penagwin »

pkaye wrote: post #16
rubatuga wrote: post #2

Where’s computer science?

There is no longer any science in computers. Going forward everything is going to be involving some combinations of Javascript, distributed systems and machine learning.

Next study: "Distributed machine learning javascript transpilers ranks #1 in jobs for 2019)

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#125

Post by metaphor »

amigocontigo wrote: post #53
randomstring wrote: post #32

Having done my BS in Match and CS at a school with a parallel Actuarial program, I got a good look at what being an actuary is about. If you're good at math, and really good at standardized math exams you can advance through the various levels and work your way up the pay-scale ladder. I think this really appeals to people who are good at math, but maybe don't want to go into academia. That said of all the actuaries…

> If you're good at math, and really good at standardized math exams you can advance through the various levels and work your way up the pay-scale ladder I was able to more than double my starting salary (ending at around 135k with bonus) 3 years out of school. I worked in consulting and thought the work was incredibly boring. The main issue is that a lot of people in the field, even those good at passing exams, aren…

> I was able to more than double my starting salary (ending at around 135k with bonus) 3 years out of school.

Care to disclose locality?

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#126

Post by Nursie »

mrep wrote: post #86
amigocontigo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're good at math, and really good at standardized math exams you can advance through the various levels and work your way up the pay-scale ladder I was able to more than double my starting salary (ending at around 135k with bonus) 3 years out of school. I worked in consulting and thought the work was incredibly boring. The main issue is that a lot of people in the field, even those good at passing exams, aren…

>> If you're good at math, and really good at standardized math exams you can advance through the various levels and work your way up the pay-scale ladder > I was able to more than double my starting salary (ending at around 135k with bonus) 3 years out of school. Have you considered software engineering because current pay starts at around 150k in big tech and I'm now making 215k 2.5 years out of college? I say this…

> Have you considered software engineering because current pay starts at around 150k in big tech and I'm now making 215k

This is highly area dependent though, surely?

In the UK, outside of London, those figures would likely be $50k and $60k

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#128

Post by fcuck_actuarial »

secabeen wrote: post #19
stochastastic wrote: post #12

As an actuary I don’t think I would recommend it for most people. At the very least, keep your options open by getting a math or CS degree and passing a couple of exams on the side. I feel like this really glosses over the weight of the credentialling process. It also doesn’t appear to talk about the oversupply of entry level applicants.

Interesting. Do you have any articles about the oversupply of entry-level actuaries? Actuarial science was a career path I considered, but I ended up in systems/network/devops instead.

Annecdotal, but I've experience this personally. These rankings grossly neglect the availability of entry level jobs. And you end up studying a bunch of stuff that is borderline useless for any other career path on a practical level.

I consider trying to become an actuary one of the greatest mistakes and waste of time in my life.

When I switched to programming, it was like some kind of magical door opened and all of a sudden and the process of finding an entry level job was no longer the equivalent of banging my head against the wall, repeatedly.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#129

Post by [deleted] »

Nursie wrote: post #126
mrep wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If you're good at math, and really good at standardized math exams you can advance through the various levels and work your way up the pay-scale ladder > I was able to more than double my starting salary (ending at around 135k with bonus) 3 years out of school. Have you considered software engineering because current pay starts at around 150k in big tech and I'm now making 215k 2.5 years out of college? I say this…

> Have you considered software engineering because current pay starts at around 150k in big tech and I'm now making 215k This is highly area dependent though, surely? In the UK, outside of London, those figures would likely be $50k and $60k

[deleted]

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#130

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

danschumann wrote: post #95
p33p wrote: post #57

As an actuary, I can not recommend it to anyone with a technical background. I have degrees in mathematics and actuarial science, and I consider my actuarial science degree completely worthless. A mathematics and/or computer science degree will teach you more in terms of how to think than anyone with an actuarial science degree. If you’d like to take a major where your professors literally teach to the exam/test, the…

It also doesn't factor in the completion % as risk. The harder the degree, the more chance you have of being saddled with debt and no prospects. ( I may have gone the actuarial science route, meanwhile tinkering with websites as a hobby, without considering websites as a career, circa 2004, then failing out of actuarial science, later getting serious about the web stuff ).

I also tried actuarial science out, just barely failing the first test twice (you need 6 out of 10 to pass, I got 5 both times). I say this as a software engineer: actuarial science is hard. There is a ton of material and the tests are easily the most insidious you will ever take.

To give an example of the insidiousness, imagine a calculus problem that has about 6 or 7 steps required to solve this - calculate the derivative, then reduce it, and maybe a sum after that. Actuarial science problems are like that as well. The tests (at least the first two) are mutiple choice, 5 answers. Each “choice” has one of two situations for wrong answers.

- The answer is the correct number but it’s the number you arrive at stage 5 of solving the problem (instead of the final stage), so you are tricked into thinking you are done when you actually have more steps to go

- the number is what you arrive at when you make a common mistake

- some combination of the above

I will say I was told (at least) that passing one or two of the tests is enough to land you a full time entry level job (and entry level for an actuarial scientist is still really good)

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