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2020 CAS UNIVERSITY AWARD WINNER
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY
Temple University’s actuarial science program has five actuarial faculty members and 250 actuarial students. The university impressed the judges with its focus on property and casualty insurance across curriculum, research, and industry engagement.
Highlights include:
The world is going through an extraordinary event.
My first CAS meeting was the 100-year anniversary annual meeting in New York City. I was planning on attending my second meeting in Orlando last fall, but as fate and my later-identified inadequate knowledge of the exam 9 material would have it, I am currently dreaming about Austin, Texas for November 2017.
Here lies the best advice I collected before my first meeting, and what I will do differently while attending my second.
Relative to some other professions, like teacher, doctor, or engineer, the job of actuary seems like a modern idea. After all, there are many fewer actuaries despite it being ranked as one of the best careers in the world. However, the practice of actuarial science is not as young as it used to be. In fact, primitive versions of actuaries are as old as insurance itself, dating back to the seventeenth century. The Casualty Actuarial Society was founded in 1914, which set forth the principles that we follow today.
When the Technology Based Examinations (TBE) were announced, I was pretty shocked to hear that the candidates sitting for a TBE exam would not be able to use a calculator for the exam. Of course, there is no need for a calculator when you have Excel at your fingertips, but my calculators were so important to me during my fellowship journey that I think of calculators as a necessary component of actuarial exams. They are the physical embodiment of all the study hours we put in as well as (fairly) reliable friends to have by our sides during the exams.
The lack of racial diversity in the actuarial profession is staggering – only 1 percent of CAS members are Black or African American, and only 1 percent are Hispanic or Latino. There were more CAS members who became Fellows in 2017 than there are CAS members who are Black or Latino (either Associates or Fellows). The CAS has recently recommitted itself to correcting this issue, as shown by updating its diversity strategy this year.
Customer centricity is a hot topic these days. Just look at the rise of behavioral economics (or read about the field in the book, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, recently reviewed on the Future Fellows Blog). Countless resources have been invested in trying to predict how consumers will act. Companies in every industry are revamping products, services and distribution models with a greater emphasis on the customer experience and what the customer wants.
It is really hard to intentionally drive into the back of a car (or a contraption made to look like the back of a car that costs a couple hundred thousand dollars). I know from personal experience because I tried to do exactly that in a Subaru with automatic emergency braking. I failed. I was nervous and started braking before the car could do it for me. Although I am not a good test driver, I'd like to think that my hesitation to run into another vehicle indicates that I am a good real-life driver.
Future Fellows is a great resource for candidates who want to learn more about CAS Exams, but candidates should also pay attention to content highlighted in the CAS Weekly Bulletin email updates that are sent both to candidates currently taking CAS exams and CAS members.
During my first actuarial internship, I felt an overwhelming need to prove myself and kept thinking I was not good enough to be working for that company. After learning how many people had applied, I told myself that timing and luck were mostly to thank for getting this coveted intern position. The move to an open-concept workspace two months into the job did not help – now I was also worried that everyone would see me clicking around my spreadsheet and suspect that I did not know what I was doing!
From Uber to Airbnb, eBay to Kickstarter, the sharing economy is where individuals share assets or services with one another directly or through other means such as the internet or an app. The sharing economy has grown more and more in the past few years as technology has made connecting with others easier than ever. But what about a long-standing and somewhat conservative industry like insurance?
If you were like me, you were caught off-guard by the recent Society of Actuaries (SOA) announcement that their general insurance (GI) fellowship track had been accepted by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) as meeting the educational standards required of a qualified actuary. I remember when the SOA created the GI track and it failed to meet NAIC standards; however, I did not know what was being done to change that or how close the SOA was. The news of the approval left me with many questions — how long has this process been going on?
A warning for any sensitive readers: Some of the cases reported about in this article have disturbing content.
It is astounding what some people will do to deceive and receive money from insurance companies. Who would...
If you’ve taken an exam in the last few years, you may have occasionally noticed a blurb in the examiners’ reports telling you to refer to a Future Fellows article about exam-taking strategies or some other exam topic. If you’re like me, you probably ignored those and continued with life — that changed for me when I started to utilize Future Fellows. Future Fellows (FF) is a valuable resource for candidates that goes beyond the occasional shout-out from the Exam Committee to one of the articles available online.
The year 2020 was supposed to be a very big one for me. In 2015 my husband and I committed to a five-year plan to take a break from working and go sailing around the world for a couple years. Deciding to take this step was pretty major for us, but also very natural. We had already purchased a previously owned 36-foot Hallberg-Rassy that had much of the equipment used for crossing oceans. We were encouraged at a cruising seminar to pursue the opportunity to travel around the world and not to wait until retirement. Others attending the seminar with us said, “Why wait? You’ve got the boat.
One of the exciting parts about working as a P&C actuary is that the work is constantly evolving. With each new emerging risk or large event, the industry learns more so that we can charge an appropriate price for the risk we are assuming. Adequate pricing ensures the solvency of the insurance industry, but what happens when an exposure is not explicitly included or excluded from coverage? These “silent” exposures have the potential to cause significant losses. Two timely examples of silent exposures are silent cyber and silent pandemic risk.
