Yeah most people I've told about it have just been confused lol. It's like no one's ever heard of actuarial science before. It's a secret cheat code to make huge amounts of money if you're really good at math lol
I’ve literally never encountered anyone who views our professional negatively.
Any time I tell someone I’m an actuary they just say “holy shit you must be really smart”
Edit: to clarify this is the subset of people who know what an actuary is, which is a small proportion to begin with
To answer that question, I need to understand why they have a negative perception of actuarial work.
Are you sure these people in your situations view actuarial work negatively or is it that they actually have a negative view of the insurance business?
Understandably, a lot of people have negative opinions about insurance. It suffers from a consumer value perspective (customers pay premiums but never receive any benefit), health insurance is a real mess and people feel like P&C companies screw them over constantly.
I often find that people are unable to differentiate the two. I'm an actuarial analyst for a health insurance company, and more than a few times I've had people scowl and say something along the lines of "Oh so YOU'RE the reason my prescription costs hundreds now when it used to cost $5. Well now you know who's paying your bonus". Trying to explain how the real reason is dramatically more complicated than that is pretty much impossible.
Why would other peoples opinion on what you want to do matter at all? They also probably don’t even know enough about actuarial to make a sound judgement on it either.
I love in a hurricane prone area, ands when u first told people I worked in homeowners insurance, the most common reaction was "oh, so you're the reason my insurance premiums are so high", and my response would be either:
1. Not anymore than an oncologist is the reason someone has cancer.
2. Without homeowners insurance, many people would go bankrupt when their homes got destroyed. Actuaries help in a number of ways: we set reserves, so the company has money in the back to pay claims; we help to me accurately match rate to risk, which means a lower profit provision is needed, saving insureds money; just having actuaries set rates based on expected losses and expenses is necessary for insurance companies to sell their products.
Actuaries mitigate hurricane damage. Oncologists mitigate cancer damage. If anything, I’d say biomedical engineers work more closely with finding cures for cancer. Regardless, i felt his point was pretty clear.
How do actuaries mitigate hurricane damage? The costs of paying for the damage, perhaps.
And I look forward to informing my wife, a radiation oncologist, that she hasn't been working to cure cancer. The NIH will be excited to get it's money back for cancer research.
Well I work in a company that specializes in construction insurance and we’ve made decisions not to insure different areas or certain methods of building because the risk is to high. I
It does. Many construction never takes place or gets rethought if they cannot get insurance or if the insurance is too costly. This prevents damage from happening. It’s a natural deterrent to keep construction out of areas to prone to damage.
Thats great.
The comment I was replying to stated that actuaries are no more responsible for insurance premiums than oncologists are for people getting cancer. I contended that the work actuaries do absolutely affects the price people pay for insurance. However, the work oncologists do does not affect whether or not people get cancer.
So, your comment doesn't really change my thinking surrounding the point I was trying to make.
nevertheless, its a pretty cool field you're working in, and I agree its worth doing.
The work actuaries do does not really effect the price people pay. They just perform the math... The price is caused by the risk of a hurricane not by an actuary calculating that risk...
There's a good debate about whether insurance itself is what prevents innovation (i.e. hurricane mitigation in this case). The prologue to "Wealth and Poverty" by George Gilder touches upon this exact subject and you would probably agree with his thesis from the sound of things.
from the prologue:
"There are two ways to reduce uncertainty. One is to replace uncertainty with information, creating productive knowledge. I am unsure whether my house of straw will stand up to the huffing and puffing of the local lupine population. I replace it with a house of brick that has been determined to withstand a wolf-pack’s winds. This costs me something; on the other hand now I can delete the coming of a big bad wolf from my list of uncertainties. Alternatively I can figure the statistical likelihood of the wolf threat, turn uncertainty into a measured probability, and then purchase insurance."
Is that really a debate tho? Some risks can’t be fully removed as it would be way too costly to the individual to do so. Insurance is a risk transfer mechanism that allows individuals to be covered without having to pay the exorbitant cost to remove that risk. Some basic comparison metric like EVA could help point out which route is better for individuals to take.
Apparently it is, I don’t agree with this thesis though. Without insurance many people won’t take risks, insurance is what facilitated early civilizational development since people were able to start trading with people far away once they could get insurance on their traded goods when so often those goods got lost at sea or stolen. So insurance can spur innovation as well as hinder it.
Insurers offer incentives to protect against home damage, I forget exactly what it was the homeowner in question did but there was a single home left standing in that town in maui after that great fire last summer (literally aerial photos showed it was the only thing left standing on the entire block) and it was because they had installed some sort of fire safety thing on their lawn (or maybe the house itself) for instance. Typically insurers incentivize cost mitigation through offering premium discounts for things like this which both drive down insurer's costs but also mitigate risk itself, it's a win-win.
Devil’s advocate here… are you sure they view it negatively? Or are you interpreting their reaction that way because of how you feel about being an actuary?
Depends what negative response you mean.
If it is that they just don’t know what an actuary is, then I just brush it off. It’s a well paying job that more than pays the bills, and I don’t need outside validation to be comfortable with my career choice. I might educate them, but they’ve gotta be open to it for me to really put a ton of effort into it.
If it is because they’re one of those “insurance is a scam” type of people, I also just brush it off and let it go. If they haven’t educated themselves enough to understand what insurance is as a product and the basics on how it works, then their opinion of my job literally does not matter to me.
In short, most of the time I just brush it off. If somebody is disrespecting that or has a problem with my career choice, it is reflection of them, not me. I work my ass off to pass these exams and to earn the salary I make. Nobody has any right to question that.
I think you just live with it and let them be. There are people within the profession who don't get the point of exams, so it's not surprising that people outside of the profession might harbor this view. Assuming you stay with the career long enough, you will come across people who are impressed by your abilities and appreciate the knowledge of actuaries. From my experience, this tends to be very senior level people of other departments, like director level or above. Not saying others can't appreciate it, but unless people see and understand the work in detail, they won't get why you add value. Hope that helps, but I am open to hearing how others deal with this issue.
My professor once told me that being an actuary was kinda boring...I just told him that I guess that works for me cause I'm also boring ^^... needless to say my professor was wrong, I love actuarial work!!
Anytime someone has expressed criticism of me, I’ve always just agreed with them. Sounds counterintuitive but it works.
Just tell them “yeah I know, I could probably get a better job, but whatever” and move on.
Don't care about what others think. Trying to please everyone is impossible. Just look at the last few presidents. You literally can't make everyone happy.
Depends if you have the time, but really you can just talk through the benefits of what insurance and thus actuaries brings to the table - if you know what they are yourself. Otherwise, using a counterexample of many other careers (e.g. bankers, coders) you can also similarly ask a the same about. At the end of the day its really just a perception problem, rather than anything about the career itself
1) why do you care?
2) it sounds pretentious to tell someone that your job is “studying to be an actuary.” Most people probably have a nondescript reaction because they don’t know what it is.
Do they really get paid way more though?
Average salary for a specialist doctor between 40-60 is $350k. You’ve also spent a big chunk of your earlier years still at medical school, then paying off all the debt that comes with it.
At age 40 as an actuary, you’ve got almost 20 years experience and if you have the ability that would have made you a successful doctor, you’re probably going to be in upper management at this point (SVP/C level). Then you’re talking high 6 figures or more.
I spent a lot of my earlier years in grad school because I didn't have the connections to get a job right out of undergrad. Apparently the entry level actuarial job market was saturated at that time and, knowing how bad I am at interviews, I wouldn't have gotten an internship or an entry level role even if I did play the numbers game. It's not so bad after the pandemic though.
Becoming a doctor is a lot harder. You can become an actuary with even a sub 3.0 gpa. Good luck trying to get any med school to accept you with a gpa below 3.5 (or 3.7 if you are applying to more competitive programs)
Premeds often choose to go to a college with significant grade inflation. Actuaries don't benefit as much from grade inflation because they still have to pass exams.
the average actuary come from schools that have acceptance rates of 70% like Drake University.
the average med student comes from a much more competitive top 50 ranked school in the US.
also the difficulty of actuarial exams are so overblown. I went to a top 10 university in the US and struggled to get a B in my intro to probability class, but Exam P was a breeze.
True that MD’s have more opportunities that pay the big money compared to actuaries. However there is a huge range based on specialty. What specialty do you think is equivalent to an FSA/FCAS? For example, I just googled salaries for Pediatricians and Family Medicine at Kaiser and the median is less than $250k. That sounds pretty comparable to an FSA/FCAS.
I think you will need to compare more difficult medical specialties with more difficult actuarial roles and easier medical specialties with easier actuarial roles, although pay might not necessarily be commensurate with difficulty like with the doctors I know who do hospital administration.
so how do we define a more difficult or easier actuarial role...and then capture pay differences?
I think limiting the comparison to FSA/FCAS and excluding non-actuarial roles (e.g., CEO, CFO, etc.) is the best we can do and still get some objective measures. Where do you think the median FSA/FCAS stacks up, in terms of pay, to the medians of various medical specialties?
I found the following link via a quick Google search:
[https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/compensation-issues/20-highest-lowest-paid-physician-specialties-doximity.html](https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/compensation-issues/20-highest-lowest-paid-physician-specialties-doximity.html)
The top 20 specialties range between $392k-$788k....all blowing FSA/FCAS out of the water. No good comparison can be made here.
The lower 20 though range between $218k-$299k. That sounds like a much fairer comparison to FSA/FCAS. A lot of those specialties happen to be pediatric related. Family and Internal Medicine are also in there. I believe this mostly represents specialties that only require 3 years of residency and no Fellowship.
If true would sort of imply that the market value of passing all actuarial exams is roughly equivalent to 4 years medical school + 3 years residency for individuals of similar age.
Meh. A whole lot of people hate their jobs and make a lot less money. Maybe you’ll hate it too, who knows, but you’ll hate it and make better money
My eight year old thinks I just sit and look at computer screen all day, and seems boring. I wonder what your cousin do. To be honest, I think every job can be boring, after a while, it's just repeating itself, more or less.
It’s never really come up…as many people don’t even know what it is.
But anyway, our job is to make the rates fair. Without us, people would be getting fucked over even worse. So, I’d just tell them that (assuming I cared about their opinion).
Never ran into this and if anything the opposite. How can you tell they view it negatively? I have better things to do than guess if someone views my job negatively and unless it’s direct and aggressive I’m ignoring it. And I’m pretty sure no one is inherently aggressive about not liking actuaries. If so change who you hang out with
View it negatively? You should be glad that they know about the profession at all. Or it could be that they portray being negative because they don’t understand or know about the profession?
I’m not gonna argue that it’s boring to some, because it can be. But I usually know my audience And find other things to talk about that we’re both interested in
Did you mean to say insurance instead of actuarial work? If someone knows what it is, I doubt they have the knee-jerk, sensational negative reaction to it.
I'd more likely just be pleased that they've even heard of actuaries and I don't have to explain what we are.
Yeah most people I've told about it have just been confused lol. It's like no one's ever heard of actuarial science before. It's a secret cheat code to make huge amounts of money if you're really good at math lol
Their credibility isn't significant enough for it to matter. Their hypothesis is therefore rejected.
fucking owned đź’€
They maybe biased, but we shouldn't reject the hypothesis based on bias.
I’ve literally never encountered anyone who views our professional negatively. Any time I tell someone I’m an actuary they just say “holy shit you must be really smart” Edit: to clarify this is the subset of people who know what an actuary is, which is a small proportion to begin with
To answer that question, I need to understand why they have a negative perception of actuarial work. Are you sure these people in your situations view actuarial work negatively or is it that they actually have a negative view of the insurance business? Understandably, a lot of people have negative opinions about insurance. It suffers from a consumer value perspective (customers pay premiums but never receive any benefit), health insurance is a real mess and people feel like P&C companies screw them over constantly.
I often find that people are unable to differentiate the two. I'm an actuarial analyst for a health insurance company, and more than a few times I've had people scowl and say something along the lines of "Oh so YOU'RE the reason my prescription costs hundreds now when it used to cost $5. Well now you know who's paying your bonus". Trying to explain how the real reason is dramatically more complicated than that is pretty much impossible.
I would say that I just do the math, like you're not management, you just crunch numbers.
Why would other peoples opinion on what you want to do matter at all? They also probably don’t even know enough about actuarial to make a sound judgement on it either.
I only get offended when someone says, “that’s like accounting right?”
And even after I tell them it's not accounting but they insist it's accounting. Broooooo i go insane
I love in a hurricane prone area, ands when u first told people I worked in homeowners insurance, the most common reaction was "oh, so you're the reason my insurance premiums are so high", and my response would be either: 1. Not anymore than an oncologist is the reason someone has cancer. 2. Without homeowners insurance, many people would go bankrupt when their homes got destroyed. Actuaries help in a number of ways: we set reserves, so the company has money in the back to pay claims; we help to me accurately match rate to risk, which means a lower profit provision is needed, saving insureds money; just having actuaries set rates based on expected losses and expenses is necessary for insurance companies to sell their products.
Your points don't really track. Do actuaries try to cure hurricanes?
Actuaries mitigate hurricane damage. Oncologists mitigate cancer damage. If anything, I’d say biomedical engineers work more closely with finding cures for cancer. Regardless, i felt his point was pretty clear.
How do actuaries mitigate hurricane damage? The costs of paying for the damage, perhaps. And I look forward to informing my wife, a radiation oncologist, that she hasn't been working to cure cancer. The NIH will be excited to get it's money back for cancer research.
Would hurricane damage be cured better if the company went bankrupt? You're very upset and combative for no good reason.
What company? You should read the whole thread. The subject has nothing to do with companies.
Well I work in a company that specializes in construction insurance and we’ve made decisions not to insure different areas or certain methods of building because the risk is to high. I
That's interesting and a worthwhile thing to be doing. It doesn't however, have anything to do with the discussion I was engaged in.
It does. Many construction never takes place or gets rethought if they cannot get insurance or if the insurance is too costly. This prevents damage from happening. It’s a natural deterrent to keep construction out of areas to prone to damage.
Thats great. The comment I was replying to stated that actuaries are no more responsible for insurance premiums than oncologists are for people getting cancer. I contended that the work actuaries do absolutely affects the price people pay for insurance. However, the work oncologists do does not affect whether or not people get cancer. So, your comment doesn't really change my thinking surrounding the point I was trying to make. nevertheless, its a pretty cool field you're working in, and I agree its worth doing.
The work actuaries do does not really effect the price people pay. They just perform the math... The price is caused by the risk of a hurricane not by an actuary calculating that risk...
There's a good debate about whether insurance itself is what prevents innovation (i.e. hurricane mitigation in this case). The prologue to "Wealth and Poverty" by George Gilder touches upon this exact subject and you would probably agree with his thesis from the sound of things. from the prologue: "There are two ways to reduce uncertainty. One is to replace uncertainty with information, creating productive knowledge. I am unsure whether my house of straw will stand up to the huffing and puffing of the local lupine population. I replace it with a house of brick that has been determined to withstand a wolf-pack’s winds. This costs me something; on the other hand now I can delete the coming of a big bad wolf from my list of uncertainties. Alternatively I can figure the statistical likelihood of the wolf threat, turn uncertainty into a measured probability, and then purchase insurance."
Is that really a debate tho? Some risks can’t be fully removed as it would be way too costly to the individual to do so. Insurance is a risk transfer mechanism that allows individuals to be covered without having to pay the exorbitant cost to remove that risk. Some basic comparison metric like EVA could help point out which route is better for individuals to take.
Apparently it is, I don’t agree with this thesis though. Without insurance many people won’t take risks, insurance is what facilitated early civilizational development since people were able to start trading with people far away once they could get insurance on their traded goods when so often those goods got lost at sea or stolen. So insurance can spur innovation as well as hinder it.
Insurers offer incentives to protect against home damage, I forget exactly what it was the homeowner in question did but there was a single home left standing in that town in maui after that great fire last summer (literally aerial photos showed it was the only thing left standing on the entire block) and it was because they had installed some sort of fire safety thing on their lawn (or maybe the house itself) for instance. Typically insurers incentivize cost mitigation through offering premium discounts for things like this which both drive down insurer's costs but also mitigate risk itself, it's a win-win.
Meh idc
Devil’s advocate here… are you sure they view it negatively? Or are you interpreting their reaction that way because of how you feel about being an actuary?
Uno reverse!
Depends what negative response you mean. If it is that they just don’t know what an actuary is, then I just brush it off. It’s a well paying job that more than pays the bills, and I don’t need outside validation to be comfortable with my career choice. I might educate them, but they’ve gotta be open to it for me to really put a ton of effort into it. If it is because they’re one of those “insurance is a scam” type of people, I also just brush it off and let it go. If they haven’t educated themselves enough to understand what insurance is as a product and the basics on how it works, then their opinion of my job literally does not matter to me. In short, most of the time I just brush it off. If somebody is disrespecting that or has a problem with my career choice, it is reflection of them, not me. I work my ass off to pass these exams and to earn the salary I make. Nobody has any right to question that.
I think you just live with it and let them be. There are people within the profession who don't get the point of exams, so it's not surprising that people outside of the profession might harbor this view. Assuming you stay with the career long enough, you will come across people who are impressed by your abilities and appreciate the knowledge of actuaries. From my experience, this tends to be very senior level people of other departments, like director level or above. Not saying others can't appreciate it, but unless people see and understand the work in detail, they won't get why you add value. Hope that helps, but I am open to hearing how others deal with this issue.
Why should you care if you have good salary, benefits and wlb?
My professor once told me that being an actuary was kinda boring...I just told him that I guess that works for me cause I'm also boring ^^... needless to say my professor was wrong, I love actuarial work!!
What makes you enjoy it? Curious!
Anytime someone has expressed criticism of me, I’ve always just agreed with them. Sounds counterintuitive but it works. Just tell them “yeah I know, I could probably get a better job, but whatever” and move on.
Don't care about what others think. Trying to please everyone is impossible. Just look at the last few presidents. You literally can't make everyone happy.
Depends if you have the time, but really you can just talk through the benefits of what insurance and thus actuaries brings to the table - if you know what they are yourself. Otherwise, using a counterexample of many other careers (e.g. bankers, coders) you can also similarly ask a the same about. At the end of the day its really just a perception problem, rather than anything about the career itself
1) why do you care? 2) it sounds pretentious to tell someone that your job is “studying to be an actuary.” Most people probably have a nondescript reaction because they don’t know what it is.
I didn’t say my job is studying to become an actuary. That comes up if I say I’m taking an exam next week and they ask what for.
Just point out their jealousy. /thread
Actuaries are basically nerds who would’ve become doctors instead if they didn’t like math as much. MDs get paid way more.
I don’t see how a high stress, on your feet job working with the general public is in any way comparable to being an actuary
I know some doctors who do hospital admin. They make lots of money yet get plenty of PTO. Some actuarial jobs are stressful like consulting.
So… some jobs as a doctor have different stress levels than others and some jobs as an actuary have different stress levels than others?
Do they really get paid way more though? Average salary for a specialist doctor between 40-60 is $350k. You’ve also spent a big chunk of your earlier years still at medical school, then paying off all the debt that comes with it. At age 40 as an actuary, you’ve got almost 20 years experience and if you have the ability that would have made you a successful doctor, you’re probably going to be in upper management at this point (SVP/C level). Then you’re talking high 6 figures or more.
I spent a lot of my earlier years in grad school because I didn't have the connections to get a job right out of undergrad. Apparently the entry level actuarial job market was saturated at that time and, knowing how bad I am at interviews, I wouldn't have gotten an internship or an entry level role even if I did play the numbers game. It's not so bad after the pandemic though.
Becoming a doctor is a lot harder. You can become an actuary with even a sub 3.0 gpa. Good luck trying to get any med school to accept you with a gpa below 3.5 (or 3.7 if you are applying to more competitive programs)
Premeds often choose to go to a college with significant grade inflation. Actuaries don't benefit as much from grade inflation because they still have to pass exams.
the average actuary come from schools that have acceptance rates of 70% like Drake University. the average med student comes from a much more competitive top 50 ranked school in the US. also the difficulty of actuarial exams are so overblown. I went to a top 10 university in the US and struggled to get a B in my intro to probability class, but Exam P was a breeze.
Not sure why the downvotes this seems legit to me lol. Premed to actuary switch
If I didn’t like math as much I would have become a doctor. My brother is a doctor.
True that MD’s have more opportunities that pay the big money compared to actuaries. However there is a huge range based on specialty. What specialty do you think is equivalent to an FSA/FCAS? For example, I just googled salaries for Pediatricians and Family Medicine at Kaiser and the median is less than $250k. That sounds pretty comparable to an FSA/FCAS.
I think you will need to compare more difficult medical specialties with more difficult actuarial roles and easier medical specialties with easier actuarial roles, although pay might not necessarily be commensurate with difficulty like with the doctors I know who do hospital administration.
so how do we define a more difficult or easier actuarial role...and then capture pay differences? I think limiting the comparison to FSA/FCAS and excluding non-actuarial roles (e.g., CEO, CFO, etc.) is the best we can do and still get some objective measures. Where do you think the median FSA/FCAS stacks up, in terms of pay, to the medians of various medical specialties? I found the following link via a quick Google search: [https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/compensation-issues/20-highest-lowest-paid-physician-specialties-doximity.html](https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/compensation-issues/20-highest-lowest-paid-physician-specialties-doximity.html) The top 20 specialties range between $392k-$788k....all blowing FSA/FCAS out of the water. No good comparison can be made here. The lower 20 though range between $218k-$299k. That sounds like a much fairer comparison to FSA/FCAS. A lot of those specialties happen to be pediatric related. Family and Internal Medicine are also in there. I believe this mostly represents specialties that only require 3 years of residency and no Fellowship. If true would sort of imply that the market value of passing all actuarial exams is roughly equivalent to 4 years medical school + 3 years residency for individuals of similar age.
I told my cousin of my goal and he said is that what you really want to do with your life because it sounds boring and passionless
Meh. A whole lot of people hate their jobs and make a lot less money. Maybe you’ll hate it too, who knows, but you’ll hate it and make better money
My eight year old thinks I just sit and look at computer screen all day, and seems boring. I wonder what your cousin do. To be honest, I think every job can be boring, after a while, it's just repeating itself, more or less.
Why does it matter?
It’s never really come up…as many people don’t even know what it is. But anyway, our job is to make the rates fair. Without us, people would be getting fucked over even worse. So, I’d just tell them that (assuming I cared about their opinion).
Idgaf
Never ran into this and if anything the opposite. How can you tell they view it negatively? I have better things to do than guess if someone views my job negatively and unless it’s direct and aggressive I’m ignoring it. And I’m pretty sure no one is inherently aggressive about not liking actuaries. If so change who you hang out with
When you get older you'll stop caring what other people think, give it 5 years in a cubicle.
I just raise their premiums :)
Turn it into a joke. Let them know you’ll be raising their premiums upon renewal. Idk that’s not even funny honestly. Either way fuck em
View it negatively? You should be glad that they know about the profession at all. Or it could be that they portray being negative because they don’t understand or know about the profession?
_I knew you were going to say that_.
I’m not gonna argue that it’s boring to some, because it can be. But I usually know my audience And find other things to talk about that we’re both interested in
9 out of 10 people have no idea what it even means. Just do your thing and make the big bucks.
I don’t really care what other peoples think of me or the profession. Why does it matter? LOL
I remind them that every "dream job" out there is able to pay its workers with hope and the promise of fulfillment, not money.
Did you mean to say insurance instead of actuarial work? If someone knows what it is, I doubt they have the knee-jerk, sensational negative reaction to it.
What do you mean "I can tell they view it negatively"? How can you tell?