t=n-1

I now have 1 day until I write FM.  I feel like I have a pretty good shot, but not close to where I want to be.  Maybe a 70% chance of passing.  A few tough questions or failing to find a groove early on and I will definitely crash and burn.  I know the feeling from P, as well as the feeling when all the dominoes just seem to fall nicely as you go through the questions and your confidence increases with each answer.  I hope it ends up being the latter obviously.

Things that are still tripping me up include some of the long calculations involved with duration and the formula derivation type questions (which is a valid expression for...).  I'm pretty solid on bonds, TVM and such.  Derivatives strategies are hit or miss, but I think "miss" is mostly on the strategies you see less frequently (reverse cash and carry: sell the index, buy a bond with proceeds, long the forward I think...  though cash and carry I know you buy a tailed position I better go look these up again).

Tomorrow:  first thing in the morning is yoga class to clear my mind. Aside from that - I keep a special notebook with all the problems I missed due to more than a stupid/calculation error.  I'll probably go over and/or rework all of these, maybe do TIA quizzes on my weak areas, look at index cards and notes - no practice exams.  Have to take it easy and be fresh Sunday morning.

For my last 3 exams I've eaten fish the day before because I hear it is good for memory - but I also failed 2 of my last 3 sittings so....If you have any tips or rituals for the day before, please share =).

-FA

Finding Motivation

One week to go and I am really having trouble pressing on with more practice exams.  I boosted up my EL to 6.75 from about 5.7 with one good exam the other day, which is encouraging because of the gains being made but also deflates me when I run into questions that stump me with much higher frequency.  I just went to start a test, couldn't get an answer for 3 of the first 4 questions, said fuck it and scored the exam up so I could look at solutions.  I know if I took the real thing today you could predict my passing with a coin flip, so I need to get through these level 6 to 8ish questions now filling my practice tests.

For now though, I think I am about to goto the bar for a drink and food  Maybe take a nap and then do a test tonight before bed.   I wish I could hit reset on my exhaustion with these practice exams somehow.

Days til test: 6.5

Earned Level: 6.75

Tests completed: about 20

About to Get Interesting

Some major news this week.  When I went into the office Monday morning I saw my SVP (my boss's boss) had on Sunday evening scheduled an early morning meeting with myself and my boss as the only attendees.  A bit odd, obviously.  Turns out my supervisor/mentor had decided over the weekend to accept an offer and was about to give official notice later in the day.

Now, to a typical analyst this might not be a big deal - so you get a new boss and continue doing what you do.  In my case, this is not true.  First, my supervisor is Director level and I am the only person that reports to them.  We work very closely and it was quite a stroke of luck to be trained 1-on-1 by a seasoned FCAS.  Secondly, our team or unit (predictive modeling) works quite autonomously compared to the pricing or reserving teams.  A typical pricing team will do the same thing from quarter to quarter and year to year - calculate indications, file rate changes with state insurance departments, rinse and repeat.  In contrast, my boss would determine what projects we would undertake (new tiering models, retention studies, research projects for the marketing department, studies of deductible strategies, and so on) with some (but limited) input from other areas of the company.  Whereas a pricing analyst can, after 3 months, more or less do what they have to do for some time, I am sort of useless without someone making decisions and designing research projects for me to work on.  Finally, my boss was just a really cool person in general and fun to work with.

Now I find myself feeling a bit insecure about the future, mostly because I am unsure how long it will be until a replacement is hired.  People say things tend to move slowly around the company and 6 months is an optimistic guess.  While I have some projects to complete in that time, 6 months is about the limit of how long I can last without the real guidance of someone designing new projects and teaching me what they know, given my current knowledge base.  That means I would have to do some serious reading on designing studies/modeling experiments myself starting now.  And while I am sure I can bring myself up to speed in this timeframe, it would come at the expense of exam progress and I am not sure if my capability would be recognized.

The other reason to feel insecure is that everyone else realizes the work I get to do is so interesting.  It seems like 1 or 2 other analysts suddenly want to spend their Friday afternoon attending some meetings with myself and my boss instead of the usual early departure.  This is some added pressure to gain recognition as being competent without close supervision - so that my job duties are not divided up amongst whoever reaches.  I am less worried about this factor given that I have much greater resources and time invested in learning about the actual modeling work, but some others have seniority, stronger relationships around the office, and deeper knowledge of their own product lines and data.

So the possibilities seem to be either that I get moved to another team where expertise exists in the near future, that my responsibility for analytics over all product lines gets divided up amongst the eager analysts, that a replacement is found quickly, or that I gain enough expertise to work independently for an indefinite period of time while also establishing my credibility and defending my turf.

Honestly, more than anything I'm really going to miss the good working relationship with my boss and their coolness on a personal level.  As I mentioned in earlier posts, I may be looking for a different company in my preferred geographic location in 9 months to a year from now anyway.  The past 3 months have gone by really quickly and I am hoping that whatever the coming months hold does not radically change my experience for the worse.

Current Adapt EL: 5.75
Remaining Study Days: 8

Epic People Study to Epic Music

No time for blog posts - here is 5 hours of epic study music.  FM in two weeks and I'm only at 4.75 earned level on ADAPT.

Dating Actuarially

I'm having a bourbon and decided I'd throw a curve ball and write a post about dating.  As a single mid-20 something recently broken up from a long term relationship, I'm becoming increasingly aware of my own shelf life as a bachelor and how this is at odds with the lifestyle (exams) I've chosen for the next 5 or so years.

At the end of April I broke up with my girlfriend of about a year.  She was a childhood friend/flame with whom I had reconnected last summer.  At the time, I was in school and we lived 3 hours apart.  The fact that we saw each other about every 3 weeks or so along with the fact that I was an impoverished, returned-college student while she was 5 years into a very successful career in finance made the relationship difficult (moreso for me than for her, of course).  As I approached graduation with only one job offer in hand (from my current employer) and that location being equally as far away from her, it became clear things were not going to work out between us.

So with that background, I re-entered the 20-something dating scene.  By "scene" I largely mean online dating...I've been around long enough to have noticed the trend, which is that if you go up and talk to a girl in person out in public these days you are automatically a creep (which was not the case 5 years ago).  I think this coincides with other increasingly anti-social trends among youth - probably due to the influence of technology and weakened bonds within communities with each passing generation.  Or maybe I'm just growing uglier as I get older, I don't know...

That said, I've had a *couple* dates since graduating in May with girls I've met in person, and in fact 0 dates from online dating sites.  But I've spent more time trying to meet girls through the sites.  I think this is a second observation - if you message a girl on an online dating site, you are automatically a creep and must be ignored.  I know - girls are inundated with messages from every slob out there once they log on.  It is also possible I am in fact coming off more and more as a creep (desperation?) as time passes, leading to greater rejection.  I would think I'd have better success as a reasonably good looking, intelligent, and charismatic guy *with a decent job*.  Anyway, just venting a bit...

Well, I know it hasn't been long and I'm meditating to cease looking and to instead allow opportunities to come to me (and to recognize them).  I'm extremely picky with looks and personality to start, so I can't help but think about how the eligible female pool is dwindling with a constant force as t --> ∞.  I wonder if my x is thinking the same as I am but about men.  Maybe we will revisit each other at 30.

Keeping up

Hey,

Been neglecting this blog.  This will likely get worse as I come up on my exam date mid-August.  I just ended my run through the last of the material (I went through options pretty quickly, hopefully I can brute force that material through 28 or so days of ADAPT).  I am pretty solid on most of the annuities/loans/bonds/TVM material.  I am getting a bit nervous and had my first nightmare the other night about being at the office post-failed attempt.  I know I will not jeopardize my position by failing on the first attempt, but it would be nice to pass it first attempt right before my 90 day review.

I am getting a bit more comfortable in my position since the last post.  I'm just shy of 2 months on the job now.  I go into the office and either have a project to resume work on, or else I know what I can read and learn about.  I'm starting to learn and use TW Emblem, for example.

My excel skills are progressing pretty nicely.  I definitely see myself either taking a VBA class or getting a book to teach myself from in the near future.  I've been finding macros online and editing them a bit to make my workbooks more user-friendsly (i.e. I was tired of having to change filters on multiple tables to update my charts to display a different band, so I found one which updates all the pivot tables on the worksheet to match the one you change).  I wish that my coworkers/bosses were a little more into advanced Excel usage and I could learn from or with them.

I've also been interacting more with our vendors lately.  ISO and some others... for purposes of requesting data, discussing our data and whatnot.  I'm happy to start building some relationships because 1. I like branching out of my cubicle and 2. I may want to go to work for one of these companies one day.

I'll leave it there, work in the morning!  If you have any excel tips/tricks, leave them in comments.

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?

Post-Start Post

So I'm two days in and getting to the first post following my start on the job, as discussed.  One thing I did not anticipate was how [mentally] exhausting a workday would be.  20% of this is probably just attributable to the stress of being in a new position where I am not yet comfortable; the other 80% I'm attributing to the fact that more than half of my time is being spent reading and trying to commit everything to memory.

The first day started with the standard HR form signing, powerpoint slideshow, a tasteful video on workplace behavior with climax at the sexual harassment scene, etc.  I did this with several other new employees but none of whom were actuarial (aside from myself).  HR ended with the building tour and pass-off to our respective managers.  I  felt pity seeing the others get dropped off in their departments located in basements and cubicle farms knowing the product development department was housed in a relatively nice location with windows.  Too bad, so sad.

So I won't bore you with every detail of the first couple days at my desk.  I've basically been sitting in with my supervisor at their regular meetings/conference calls where things such as rate sheet changes and good beers are discussed.  When I am not doing that I am either getting a powerpoint presentation about some aspect of my job or else studying something included in my 3 month learning plan.  I am reading the Exam 5 syllabus paper on ratemaking, going through some training modules on our products and studying for my next exam.  I also have a paper to read on GLM and some user manuals for software in use there.

Among all the analysts I am the least advanced in my exam progression.  I expected this but it will mean I won't have a study buddy to work on the material with.  Not a big deal, just worth mentioning.  The other analysts say I have to slow down my reading pace and spread it out over a couple months - it is true that I'm already letting FM get sidelined by the other stuff.  Since one of my tasks is to develop a study plan for my next exam I don't think that will stay the case though.

Well, more informational meetings tomorrow with product managers in various product lines, analysts who work in the respective lines and in reserving, etc.  One thing I've learned so far is that the knowledge base required to become proficient in my role (R&D), since I will work with all the product lines, is much broader than that of the pricing/reserving analysts (though probably also less deep).  But I think this experience will be very valuable in my career down the road for that reason.

-Analyst

Prelims

I'm at a coffee shop drinking a beer and enjoying the irony.  Just wrapped up a long day of studying for FM and I think I'll get to writing about how I landed an actuarial position.

I graduated in 2009 - probably the worst year for a new graduate to enter the labor market.  My first degree was in the social sciences and I actually managed to land a position in my field of choice.  I can't say exactly what that was - I'll call it organizational development, broadly speaking.  I worked in that area for 2 years doing long hours of non-analytical work for little salary.  The experience was really not transferable to insurance aside from soft skills (which I really talked up during my interview).

I decided to go back to school in 2011 to pursue a more rigorous degree and a better-paying career.  By that time I still had never heard of an "actuary" - I thought I might go to grad school for economics or do something with technology.  But I knew whatever I went for I'd have to have a solid background in math and with nothing beyond high school 'advanced algebra' I started there.  In two years I did everything from Calc I through Analysis with coursework in economics and computer science and some upper level probability and statistics.

I sat for P the first time in November 2012.  I don't exactly remember where I had heard of actuarial by then - I think I saw some literature hanging up in my department.  Anyway, I didn't prepare and got a 4.  I took it again in January after some serious, intensive study.  I used ADAPT and TIA, reached level 8 in ADAPT, felt ready and failed with a 5.  At that point I had written off ever getting into the profession with graduation so close, but nevertheless I registered (out of frustration and stubbornness) again for March the same day I failed.  I never found the time to study between January and March as I was taking a heavy course load.  I went in expecting to fail and not caring.  It was quite a feeling to finally see the congratulations message at the end of the exam - grades were recently released and I passed with a 9.  So either I was extremely unlucky in January or very lucky in March.  In any case, I got my resume together the same day.

I didn't think I would have much luck applying with one exam, no internships and so late in the season.  So I submitted my resume to the black holes for internship positions and emailed the directory about possible openings.  I applied to two full-time positions, one of them following a networking event at my school where an open position was mentioned.  I was surprised to hear back within a week about doing an on-site.

At the time I was more committed to being in a different city and taking any non-actuarial position I could get while passing more exams.  This was because of a girl whom I more recently broke up with, but was seriously dating at the time.  So I went into the first round of interviews not expecting much and not caring what happened - it was more of a practice run.  This must have been the right attitude because I easily connected with my interviewers and was pretty relaxed throughout.  The questions were not very hard - nothing technical, all soft stuff about how I approach work and coworkers.  I had some experience in a professional setting to talk about which was a definite plus.  I was asked a little bit about what I could do in Excel and Access as it was on my resume - I threw out some random words like 'joins' and 'record macros' and the interviewer (the database guy at the firm) was actually satisfied.  If he had followed up with nearly any technical question involving either joins or macros I might have been in trouble.  But I do actually have some surface knowledge of these programs through school, so I was not totally BSing.

My second round was similar.  I met with the higher ups at the company (a small company).  I think the decision had already been made and the purpose of this round was for the higher ups to give the green light.  I got the offer within a week following the second on-site.

Some things I will highlight which came up in the interviews and I believe contributed to my hiring:

• Luck - the greatest factor I am sure.  The opening came up at the right time for me, the applicant pool may have been weak, I had met someone at the above mentioned event who probably said I was serious and worth talking to.  Aside from luck though...
• solid GPA (got me in the door with 1 exam)
• professional experience in an office setting of a medium sized company (~700 employees) - I was able to talk about working on a team, handling certain types of situations with coworkers and clients, other soft stuff.
• Volunteer and hobbies - I volunteer in organizations doing things which are related to my hobbies.  So I was able to show I have a life outside of school as well as that I take on leadership responsibilities in groups.  If I saw an applicant with the typical volunteer activities (neighborhood cleanups, volunteering to tutor kids at the local public school, fundraisers for a relief effort, etc.) I would just think they were looking for filler on their resume and will cease all such activity once they get a job.  And that would probably be true.  Doing something you actually enjoy is more believable and says more about you, IMO.
• Asking the right questions - I have a philosophy on this which is similar to my philosophy on dating.  Go in with a lot of questions and don't seem too eager for the position.  Make them interview for you, particularly in the first round.  If you seem too eager they will think you will take any position, which means (at least, I would think this if I were on the other side of the table) that you are desperate for anything and will leave them as soon as the right position comes along.  The most difficult question I had in all my interviews was: if it was offered to me, would I take a pricing position instead of the R&D position I was interviewing for.  I answered pretty honestly: the market is tough and I would strongly consider it after hearing the details of said position, but I would probably not be as excited from what I know about traditional pricing/reserving roles as I would be to take a position in product development.  I don't think my answer was perfect, but I think 'yes, definitely' would have been the worst answer after all the interviewing for the position I was there for.  A 'no' would have ruled out an offer if they were actually thinking I was a better match for another position.  The point is that I said I would have to hear about the position first - fit matters to me and I'm not too eager to jump at anything.
• Access and Excel - I learned these in a formal setting, training opportunities that I sought out (as mentioned though, I will still have a lot to learn on the job).  They liked that.  Take some initiative and then talk about it.
• For the career changers: a good story about why you are changing careers!  Don't say you didn't enjoy it - say it wasn't challenging.  Definitely don't say it paid too little.  Say you wanted better opportunities for skill development and growth.  Then lead the interviewer into asking about the things you 'learned' which will transfer to an actuarial position.
• Dress sharp, come with multiple copies of your resume, arrive early - all that generic advice which I'm not going to repeat.  It all matters though.

My advice is certainly not to apply to only 1 or 2 positions as I did.  Also, the cold emailing of the directory actually bore some fruit - one actuary wrote back asking that I keep them updated on my exam progress, another that they would keep me on file and I should check back in periodically.  I would have nurtured those leads after passing another exam had I not gotten this position.

So that is it for now.  I'll post after my first day on the job and this will get more exciting when I can talk about work and what I learn on the job.  But I hope this gives some encouragement to the ho-hum candidates out there like myself - if you play up your strengths you might get lucky, despite having few exams, no internship, etc..

-Analyst