Insurance Careers Month and the CAS Resources Available to Support You!
This February marks the second annual Insurance Careers Month campaign. The CAS is proud to participate in this campaign alongside over 600 insurance organizations to spread the message of insurance as the “Career Trifecta”: stable, rewarding, and limitless. Insurance Careers Month and the broader year-round movement align well with the CAS’s extensive ongoing university engagement efforts. As a CAS Student Central member, you have access to a number of CAS resources created to support you on your path to a career in the property and casualty insurance industry.
We pose the following questions to help you determine whether you are taking full advantage of these resources!
- Have you checked to see whether a CAS University Liaison is assigned to your school?
The CAS University Liaison Program matches practicing actuaries with universities to help facilitate the partnership between actuarial science programs and the actuarial profession. University Liaisons are available on an ongoing basis to share their insights about the insurance industry and the actuarial profession. Liaisons typically visit campus 1-2 each year to speak and present at student events, actuarial club meetings, and in class. They are prepared to answer your questions on a variety of career related topics including the exam process, landing your first internship, networking, and more! Check the CAS University Match List to determine whether your school has a volunteer assigned. If your school does not have a University Liaison and you’d like to request one, please complete the following form. You can also use the form to submit questions about the volunteer on the match list for your school.
- Do you know what CAS Student Programs are being offered in 2017?
The CAS offers student programs at five meetings and seminars annually. Attendees are invited to spend the day meeting and networking with practicing actuaries, and learning more about the CAS and P&C Industry. Check out the list of programs taking place in 2017. For details on registering for any of these programs contact Tamar Gertner, CAS University Engagement Manager.
- Have you attended a CAS Student Central Webinar or listened to a recording?
These live, one-hour webinars are offered 1x per semester and cover a variety of topics. Each webinar is recorded and is available to watch in the CAS Student Central Online Community File Library. Stay tuned for an invitation to the upcoming spring webinar!
Previous webinar topics have included:
- The Entry-Level Job market for Actuaries: What’s Hot, What’s Not, and How to Position Yourself for Success
- Predictive Analytics and Data Science for Aspiring Actuaries
- Excel and R for Actuaries
- Career Paths in the Property and Casualty Actuarial ProfessionÂ
- Do you read the monthly CAS Student Central Newsletter?
The newsletter is sent out the first Thursday of each month and will inform you of important news items from the CAS and hot topics in the property and casualty insurance industry that you can reference on your next job interview! The communication also highlights upcoming dates related to exam sittings and registration deadlines, scholarship applications, and networking events. The newsletters are archived in the CAS Student Central Newsletter section of the website.Â
- Have you heard about the CAS Trust Scholarship?
The CAS Trust Scholarship is awarded to up to three deserving students per academic year. First place will receive a $10,000 scholarship, and Second and Third Place, if chosen will each be awarded a $5,000 scholarship. The upcoming scholarship deadline is March 1, 2017, and scholarship recipients will be announced in May. The objective of this merit-based scholarship is to support college and university students’ interest in the property and casualty actuarial profession and to encourage the pursuit of the CAS designations.
- Have you checked out the CAS Career Center’s database of actuarial internship opportunities in the property and casualty field?
The CAS Career Center offers a user-friendly platform to search for property and casualty internships. Students are offered free and confidential resume posting, options to save internships that are of interest, and more!
We encourage you to take advantage of these resources available to support you on your career path throughout Insurance Careers Month as well as year-round. Additionally, visit the Insurance Careers Month website to see the list of campaign partners and supporters offering additional resources for students.
Please contact CAS Marketing and Communications Coordinator Arnulfo Moreno with any questions.
New Exam MAS-II covers some of the material in Exam C – primarily credibility theory – but also covers new statistics and analytics materials such as Linear Mixed Models, Bayesian Analysis & Markov Chain Monte Carlo, and Statistical Learning, all of which have become valuable and critical for casualty actuaries. This exam will first be offered in the fall of 2018, and the transition rule simply dovetails with the last scheduled offering of Exam C in the spring of 2018. The 
In February we were happy to announce that CAS would be taking part in 
Over the course of 2016 our CAS Student Central social media presence expanded and we wanted to use it to reach you directly and answer questions you might have, so we hosted our first 
In the fall, to help give you a broader look at the actuarial profession, we focused the CAS Student Central webinar on 
Compensation – What are they offering financially? The base salaries offered by both companies may be similar, but you must also consider a few other factors. Look at bonus potential (are you even eligible?), student program bonuses and raises for passing exams and receiving credentials, and company benefits. What might seem like a similar pair of salaries may seem very different when you dive into the details.
Career Path – Is there room at your potential employer for growth? Will you be part of a rotational program or will you be slotted into a role for the foreseeable future? Consider the size of the company and how actuaries move along their career path. If the company is small you might not have the opportunity to move up. If the company is large, you may be doing a very narrowly defined job that will not give you the skills to move forward.
Companionship – Did you like the people you met on your interview? You will be spending a very large portion of your waking hours with your coworkers. If you don’t like them, or there just aren’t many of them, you might find yourself miserable or just plain lonely.
Culture– Does the company culture fit your personality?  If you are the laid back type, you might not be happy at a company that has a high speed, constantly changing landscape. Conversely, if you are a high-energy type-A personality, you might not enjoy working for a more conservative, slow paced organization.  This is a good topic for questioning during the interview stage, so you can truly understand the company you are working for and how you would fit in terms of temperament.
The CAS has made it easier than ever to run an actuarial case competition for university students! With the help of practicing actuaries and some serious volunteer time, the CAS has developed two case competitions, complete with toolkits that offer you guidance and templates to run your own case competition.
Based on average survey ranking, the most risky Halloween monster is Dracula / Vampires. While no one selected Dracula as the most risky, almost all respondents ranked him (it?) second! Concerns about Dracula, from a risk management perspective, centered primarily around severity: if it bites you, that’s pretty much all she wrote, and you join the can’t-get-enough-of-that-O-positive club. Interestingly, the fact that Dracula is only active at night was used by respondents on both sides of the frequency issue, as an indication that the risk might be both lower and higher: active “only at night” versus “every night.” One person suggested that, from the standpoint of exposures, there’s only one Dracula – but don’t the bitten then also become vampires? Also, it was pointed out that the original Bram Stoker version could shapeshift, and was master of those he “recruited,” and thus had the potential to be a particularly grueling risk. These last few comments demonstrate the importance of correctly ascertaining and defining the essential characteristics of your risk, in order to properly quantify and assess the underlying exposure, as well as the frequency and severity potential.
Here I must embarrassedly provide a caveat. When I first sent this survey to my colleagues, I had included only the first seven monsters – I had somehow forgotten zombies! Several recipients of the survey pointed out this dreadful lacuna (which I contend was caused by the insidiousness of zombies themselves, and their effect on my brain!), but by then it was too late to add zombies to the survey. Nevertheless, a few respondents themselves chose to add zombies to their rankings and, although the sample size is much smaller than for the other classes, zombies did achieve the second-highest risk ranking, very close behind Dracula / Vampires.
This one surprised me a bit – clearly, I’m no horror expert. I thought that, for this dude, exposure would be low because he’s only a problem on nights with a full moon. But others felt that frequency per unit of exposure (on those infrequent nights, he has an insatiable appetite) and severity (if you happen to be in the same room with this guy, you’re probably dead) would be significant, even if the exposure itself is only about once per month.
Coming in fourth on our list of greatest risk-hits are witches and wizards. A problem with them is quantifying the exposure level: you never quite know who is and isn’t a witch (who would have suspected Selena Gomez?!). And, like most of the high-risk-ranking monsters, the potential severity is enormous – one thought, or nose-wiggle, or finger-snap could take out the whole town. On the good side, with respect to frequency of damage, unless they’re provoked, they’re generally not harmful. So “just leave them alone” would be sound risk management advice!
There was some disagreement among respondents regarding The Mummy, and so here’s another example of the need to precisely identify, characterize, and define your risks. Some felt he should be low on the list (perhaps you can simply outrun him). Others were concerned that he’s the one on the list that truly seems to want to kill everyone, and that he himself can be hard to kill, requiring magic or an ancient Egyptian curse. (So I guess we can’t just nuke him?)
Now this is a really interesting one, and it has a very important lesson for actuaries and risk analysts. The responses and rankings on The Grim Reaper had by far the highest standard deviation of any of the eight monster types – i.e., there was more disagreement in the rankings. In fact, roughly the same number of people ranked TGR most risky, as ranked it least risky. I think what has happened here is a common issue: causality versus correlation. Let’s face it: if TGR shows up, you’re pretty much toast. But is TGR the cause of death, or just the messenger (and thus the link between TGR is one of correlation, rather than cause)? My interpretation (and again, we need to define and characterize our risks accurately!) is that death is caused by other factors, and TGR just shows up at the appropriate time. In that sense, TGR would not be risky per se – but would be a rather reliable indicator that death is imminent.
Ghosts were generally low-rated, on the basis that they may be unable to do physical damage (although see Ghostbusters – “I think he can hear you, Ray”), and they tend to stick to their own stomping grounds. But there’s certainly potential for emotional distress and mental damage. Plus, again, how do we know the extent of the exposure?
Not the brightest bulb on the tree, he can be both outrun and out-thought. (But what’s up with that haircut??)