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