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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

#191

Post by clarkeni »

thedevil wrote: post #72
alouisos wrote: post #60

Beware, actuarial science will be replaced by AI and the incentives of insurance is high to replace this workforce with AI. Believe me, I have been doing an AI startup in exactly this space

I wouldn't be too confident in that. Actuaries are not able to implement the models they'd like to. Regulators don't like complex models and they don't like models with disparate impact. Or models that make some risks (accurately) expensive. I'm a developer now but by last few years in actuary work were mostly spent helping insurance companies deal with regulation. We did some modeling with with machine learning but…

Absolutely, great points.

I think there could be scope to use ML on the pricing side however, while leaving the reserving models explainable to regulators.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#192

Post by clarkeni »

dmhn wrote: post #127

The problem with an Actuarial career is that there is no room to advance. When my father finished graduate school, he became an actuary. Fortunately, the insurance company went under, and he moved to finance only a few years later.

A good proportion (often all) of C-level insurance executives were actuaries that moved up the ranks. I would say it has quite good advancement opportunities.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#193

Post by pcwalton »

rayiner wrote: post #175
p33p wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By all means, if you can get through the exams, you will be left with a low stress, well paying job at an insurance company, and you’ll likely have great job security. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But as Christensen talks about in one of his books, those are hygiene factors. You can find fulfilling, motivating work as an actuary, but salary should not be the main reason for choosing a career.

> salary should not be the main reason for choosing a career. Why?

Because of the law of diminishing marginal utility as applied to income [1]? Once you hit a certain level of income, other factors can start to outweigh the marginal utility of a higher salary.

For example, I could maybe make more money working in high frequency trading, but I don't want to. It wouldn't be a life-changing amount of money, and I value the ability to work on interesting problems in the open, with less concern for ethical issues†, over the potential additional income.

[1]: https://qz.com/1211957/how-much-money-do-people-need-to-be-h...

†I don't want to start an argument about whether HFT is unethical; in fact, I don't think it is necessarily unethical. I'm just saying it would always be at the back of my mind.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#194

Post by ubercow13 »

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

Or inside

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#195

Post by Moodles »

tasuki wrote: post #177
random_kris wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do you do in crypto? As a programmer I find bitcoin really fascinanting and was thinking about learning the codebase and trying to contribute something to community but I find it really hard to do so...

A couple years ago, "crypto" would have been short for cryptography. These days, it can be that or the cryptocurrency madness. In this case, I thought Moodles meant cryptography. Also, I'm not sure whether you're joking by choosing to understand it as cryptocurrency. Or perhaps you're both talking about cryptocurrencies and I'm the only confused one here...

I mean cryptography.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#196

Post by jamesrcole »

m00n wrote: post #179
jamesrcole wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, there doesn't have to be a single definition. Here's some other factors that could be part of "value": - degree of job satisfaction - how much that sort of work benefits the world It's very narrow to equate value only with money. And because I know someone is going to misinterpret what I'm saying, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with equating value with money. It's just a bit sad when that's all v…

I was thinking along these lines, too. But the problem with job satisfaction is: Do you rely on self-reported job satisfaction or objective quantitities like absenteeism or turnover? Both are hard to make comparable between different fields: In some (think med, law etc) the cost of education will prohibit changing careers, regardless of if you make millions as patent lawyer or heart surgeon (assuming that the latter…

Just because something is difficult to quantify doesn't meant it doesn't exist or is unimportant.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#197

Post by intended »

vostok wrote: post #119
intended wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finance people in IB/PE would be pulling it up. It’s impressive that programming is that high.

Having worked in trading (not IB, but the recruiting process is similar) - it's useful to know that relatively few people get into IB and fewer stay in IB or go on to MF PE. Corporate jobs pay significantly less and make up a much greater portion of the jobs. IB is a low headcount industry.

Having seen that industry as well, the numbers there are very high, and can skew true ever loving crap out of any average.

Re: Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

#198

Post by lucas_membrane »

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…

I went into actuarial work very long ago, and I cannot say anything about how it goes now, as I have long been away from it. When I started, an actuarial degree was a rarity for an actuary. I was glad to study something more challenging and engaging in school before entering into a profession that so rarely requires any knowledge of anything more than the conventions of an arcane art. How is it different now? What do life insurance actuaries do now that there are so few life companies? Same question for casualty insurance companies? What do pension actuaries do now that there are so few defined benefit plans? What percentage of practitioners now have actuarial degrees? How do you stay awake at the professional meetings?
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