When I was working on my math degree in the late 80’s the math department hosted at least one meeting to “Meet an Actuary”. They were recruiting rather hard to fill the vacancies for the local insuarnce companies. The turn off for me then was the fact that the young lady I spoke to said she spent a fair amount of her job (while not studying) programming. At the time I did not want to be a programmer at all.
Fast forward seventeen years. I have been a programmer for 15 years or so and am thinking about considering changing careers to be an actuary. Is that irony? The biggest obstacle is relearning the math that I have forgotten. The second is learning the math I never really learned in the first place (probability kicked my ass in college). Or maybe those should be reveresed. My unformed general kind of idea is that I would find some way to study and pass the first exam on my own and then use that to get a job. I’m hoping that the test will get me in the door and my programming experience will get me a job and better than normal first salary (hey I got bll to pay). This site indicates I miht be able to get a livable salary maybe.
The job prospects are good, the salaries can be very goos as you progress through the ranks and there are several large insurance and health insurance companies and pension management companies in the area which should offer me some opportunity.
I’m scared about relearning all the math. I was an average student at best, smart, but lazy. I hope I would not be lazy this time. Are there classes I could take to cram on the math stuff?
Would employers care that I have so much programming experience? I know C, VB6, some Unix shell scripting, some awk, SQL, a little bit of Cobol. How much will that matter?
So, any thoughts from the Teeming Millions?