New Post!

Hey,

So it's been a little while since I wrote - I'm learning how hard it is to balance between work, studying and life.  I think this is probably harder up front in a new position than it is after you've settled in.  At least I think that will be the case for me given the pressure I put on myself to learn quickly.  I went in over the weekend to work on a little excel project I had been given involving a UBI (Usage Based Insurance) dataset from a pilot program my company is participating in.  I learned a lot more about excel in the past 5 days or so working on that project than I had in years of informally using excel for small tasks.  By the time I was done, I had concatenated nested sumifs with vlookups and created many nice pivot tables and charts.  Still  have to work on speed, and once I really get all the functionality down I will try to get away from the mouse.  And I have to explore a bit more the data visualization capabilities, which seem pretty limited.

For those who don't know what UBI is - it is basically the implementation of the idea that your premium should be determined by how and how much you use your insured product.  Knowing this requires accurate real-time measurement and technology is now such that we can get a good idea in the area of personal automobiles by plugging a device which tracks usage and sends the data back to your insurance company into the OBD port of your vehicle's computer.

I'm also working on putting together a dataset in Access by pulling information from multiple policy and claims databases, aggregating at a policy-year level and tacking it on to a field of nulls in the master set.  This is a lot easier than building a long query with multiple joins but takes a lot more time when you are working with a million records.  Right now I am just trying to get by so I will probably stick with this method but I know I will need to work on building nicer queries so that only 1 or 2 are necessary.  If you are applying for entry level positions and all of that is a foreign language to you, get a book on Access and read it before your next interview!

We had our first Office Space type event where everyone solemnly stood around eating some food to celebrate somebody's birthday.  One thing about my company is they could really do a lot to improve the office culture.

The next big challenge is to do a retro-validation of a new pricing model for one of our products using some hold-out data.  This was daunting at first but after amping up my excel abilities I have at least a mental sketch of what the spreadsheet will look like formula-wise.  I got complements on the last project from my boss (which went out to 25 or so people in my company, including some at the C-level), but this early it is hard to say whether that was a confidence fluffer or if I legitimately put together a good analysis.

That's all for now.  Have a good week.

-Analyst

First Week Through

I've made it through the first week on the job and it is a good time to post up some of my higher level reflections on the challenges of jumping into my first role with no working knowledge of what is actually done in the office.

As mentioned before I am mostly studying and trying to absorb information - on the products, underwriting guidelines, the exam 5 paper on Ratemaking, powerpoints created by staff over the years, our data sources, basic pricing methods (calculating rate indicators, parallelogram method) and FM material when I can find time.  The amount of material that has been thrown at me is pretty daunting and by Friday I was at the "how am I ever going to learn all this" point.  Our claims data in particular is a bit of a mess - there are multiple claims systems for different products, each with different nuances/issues I have to be aware of when using it for analysis. The fields in each table are mostly cryptic (due to a character limitation of SAS when pulling from the mainframe, I believe) and a lot of entries are codes which require translation.  I think I am retaining something like 30% of what I am being told in my various informational meetings/conversations.

Now I am sure I will reach the point within a few weeks where I have been immersed for so long that everything just starts making more sense and I start retaining a higher proportion of what is given to me.  At least, that is the faith I am holding on to.  It would be encouraging to hear from another analyst or someone that they know exactly what I am experiencing and give me some comparison data that says I am doing as well or better than others were at a comparable point in their training.  I know it is not likely, but I imagine getting let go after several months because of learning difficulty.

If anyone with experience happens to read this, I'd appreciate if they could answer two questions:

1. What does the typical training program fully consist of? I'm wondering if I can expect more than slide shows and readings in the future, and if being overwhelmed at the start is normal.

2. How long until one should be able to do some productive tasks?