First Day of Classes

With September comes the start of the new academic year. The department is offering the following actuarial courses this fall.

ACSC116 Mathematics of Finance taught by myself and covering theory of interest topics
ACSC317 Actuarial Models I covering advance life contingencies topics, taught by Larry Miller
ACSC417 Introduction to Casualty Insurance and Credibility, also taught by Larry Miller
ACSC418 Econometric Models and Forecasts, taught by Taehan Bae

We also have six students out on internships which will continue until the end of August 2013.

What to Do After the Degree

Often the questions that I get from current and prospective students areabout jobs after school and relating these to the ActSci Degree.  Ratherthan have me try and tell them, it struck me that it would be useful to haveformer students talk about what their experience.

So I'm contacting a few alumni and asked them a few questions as follows:

• When did you graduate?
• What do you do now (job title, area of work, who you work with etc)?
• Actuarial designations achieved (if any)?
• How did your degree help you?
• What else did you need to learn along the way?
• What do you do outside of work?  
• How do you balance work, play and study?

First to the wire was Will Du, who works with Sun Life in Toronto.  Will graduated at the top of a very strong class and continued his successes in business.  I'll post responses from more students over the next month or so.

When did you graduate?
June 2009


What do you do now?  
I am currently Associate Director, Individual Health Pricing, Sun Life
Financial.

As you can tell from my title, I am responsible for pricing individual
health products (also known as living benefit products), e.g. Critical
Illness Insurance, Long Term Care Insurance, etc... I find health pricing
is very interesting, because of the health product market is so young and
so dynamic, unlike some other matured insurance market, health product
still has a very fast rate of innovation on product design front. And the
same time, with the high level of innovation on product design, a high
creative pricing is required.

In addition to that, Pricing in general is a very exciting function of
actuaries.  Pricing actuaries together with product managers hold the
responsibility of managing the life cycle of a particular insurance
product, e.g. assess its profitability, competitiveness, sales volume,
distribution channels, and impact from new regulations, etc... So pricing
and product function acts like a manufacturing department of an auto
company, they design it, put it into production, monitor sales, gather
feedback, and re-design it, and goes on and on... At meanwhile, pricing
actuaries need to get involved in discussions of investment strategy since
it is liability driven, capital and risk management, so it has a pretty big
exposure internally. Externally, pricing actuaries will be responsibility
for negotiating reinsurance deals with external reinsurers and working with
reinsurers to develop new products.

Sun Life is one of the big three in Canadian insurance market. In many
industrial measures, Sun Life is the number ONE and it is acting as a
leader in the market. With such a large employer, I benefit from it in many
areas. One of the areas is its active actuarial rotation program. With a
bit over 3 years at Sun Life, I have rotated from Individual Valuation role
to Individual UL Pricing role, and now I am Individual Health Pricing. Some
of my co-workers even have the opportunity to rotate to Sun Life's foreign
offices, e.g. Hong Kong, Boston, Bermuda and many other joint ventures in
Asia. And a large company is more dynamic, which will give people more
growth opportunities.

Actuarial designations achieved?
FSA (Fellow of the Society of Actuaries)2010
CERA (Certified Enterprise Risk Analyst) 2011
Hint : Will needs to get his FCIA (Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries)

How did your degree help you?
I'm always very grateful to UofR for providing me the opportunity to get
into the actuarial field. Specifically it prepares me for the SOA exams and
equips me with the working experience through its excellent internship
program. I think it is these two items got me an full time offer after
graduation. Thinking back, I feel I was very lucky too. The Economy was not
great during 2008-2009, plus I was was international student, which means I
needed to apply for a work visa in order to work. UofR definitely made me an
employable actuary.

What else did you need to learn along the way?Lots, but in the first year or so, I was focusing on finishing up my exams
(therefore I could get my "exciting life" back from the SOA). After getting my FSA the
learning continues, not only the technical knowledge, but the
communication, interpersonal and leadership skills as well.  It is a profession with a life
time of learning.

What do you do outside of work?I play basketball, ping pong, Starcraft II.  I enjoy looking at various
cars - the newest addition to Subaru family, BRZ, it's a pretty awesome
car! (not sure if it has been arrived at SK, but people can test drive it
from Toronto dealership) BRZ is a joint venture between Toyota and Subaru,
it has a twin brother called Scion FRS or Toyota 86 in Japan... (I can go
on and on on this topic...)

How do you balance work, play and study?
First of all, I was not even trying to be balanced during my exam taking
period, i.e. it was pretty much work and library. In 2010, I got my FSA,
then everything automatically balanced. It comes naturally because I do
not need to go to library any more.  After that, it depends on how fast you
want to advance on your career path.

Upcoming Changes to SOA Preliminary Exams

During the 2012 ARC Stuart Klugman from the SOA outlined some upcoming changes to the preliminary exams.  The details have not been finalized but we can expect to see the following changes in 2013.

• Exam P will remain unchanged
• For Exams FM and MFE, the syllabi will be updated to include the 3rd edition of the McDonald text which is due out this fall.  
• For Exam MLC, the addition of written answer questions is being considered.  Conversion of MLC to CBT is being placed on hold until this decision has been made. 
• For Exam C, a fourth edition of the Loss Models text will be released shortly.  This edition will see the removal of much of the material not on the exam syllabus, and expanded material on simulation and mortality table construction.

Note that no changes will be made for the Fall 2012 exams.  Changes to FM, MFE and C could be made for the Spring 2013 sitting,  depending on the timing of new texts.  In addition, where there is a new text edition it is likely that there will be a transition sitting for which students can use either the old or new edition.  The change to have written answer questions on MLC will not be made until 2014 (if at all).

On the subject of MLC, there was a session with a lively discussion of the Spring 2012 exam which had an unusually low pass mark and an unusually low pass rate.   Stuart indicated that this exam was much harder than the exam committee had intended, and that the Fall exam results were expected to return to normal.  He indicated that there is often a learning curve for both the exam setters and the students when there is a major change in text book.  Stuart also confirmed that either of the two text books listed for MLC would give a student the background needed to pass the exam. 

2012 Actuarial Research Conference - Winnipeg

I was in Winnipeg on August 1-4 for the Actuarial Research Conference.  It was a great programme that filled 2 1/2 days (the abstracts can be found at ARC Program).  Apart from the talks and presentations, highlights included:

• Catching up with our U of R interns and alum at Great West Life (GWL).  Shelby Herman and Lauren Mazurkewitz have just started their 16 month internship in May of 2012 and they seem to be settling in well and having a great experience with GWL.  Kali Spencer is a 2010 U of R GRad and recent ASA/ACIA who has followed up a GWL internship with a full time job on graduation.
• A dinner on Thursday night celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Actuarial Program at University of Manitoba (at U of R we still have 88 years to go).  This was linked to the conference and held at U of M, but there were a lot of local actuaries from Winnipeg, including Shelby and Lauren who went as part of the GWL contingent.
• A dinner at the Manitoba Club featuring very good entertainment in the form of jazz croonings from Sam Broverman (head of the Actuarial program at U of T).  I particularly enjoyed his take on "Accentuate the Positive" with new lyrics to fit the CIA's accreditation policy.
• Catching up an net working with academic actuaries from across the US and Canada.

Death of Evidence Rally

I should have posted this much earlier, but better late than never.  I'll be attending the Regina
Death of Evidence Rally to protest Mr. Harper's policy towards science research (you have no idea how much restraint I've shown in this sentence).  Of particular concern to actuaries are

1. The cancellation of the mandatory long form census form, which invalidated the entire long form census.  This was nothing short of petty ideology aimed at satisfying a very small minority of right wing conservative faithful (check Stats Can's figures on how many complains have been received on the long form).  I am a member of no less than 3 groups who wrote to the Harper government decrying this move (the CIA, CAUT and the U of R).
2. Budget cuts (more precisely a gutting) of Stats Canada.

Alumni Achievements

While I was at the CIA's annual meeting in Toronto June 21-22nd, I ran into several U of R ActSci Alumni, three of whom were hitting actuarial milestones.  Paul Gobeil (class of 2008) received his FCIA during the meeting.

In addition, Derek Beatch and Kali Spencer (both class of 2010) were not at the CIA meeting but were attending an Associate Professionalism Course held at the same hotel.  This means that they should both become ASAs and ACIAs shortly.

Congratulations to all three.

Congratulations to Ha Lam - Double Award Winner

The Governor General's Academic Silver Medal is awarded to the undergraduate student who achieves the highest academic standing in a bachelor's degree program. The recipient is Ha Lam, who is also this year's winner of the University Prize in Science. She is graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Actuarial Science, with Internship designation and achieving Great Distinction with cumulative grade point average above 93 per cent.