4 ms·

It also doesn't factor in the completion % as risk. The harder the degree, the more chance you have of being saddled with debt and no prospects. ( I may have

It also doesn't factor in the completion % as risk. The harder the degree, the more chance you have of being saddled with debt and no prospects. ( I may have gone the actuarial science route, meanwhile tinkering with websites as a hobby, without considering websites as a career, circa 2004, then failing out of actuarial science, later getting serious about the web stuff ).

SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
I also tried actuarial science out, just barely failing the first test twice (you need 6 out of 10 to pass, I got 5 both times). I say this as a software engineer: actuarial science is hard. There is a ton of material and the tests are easily the most insidious you will ever take. To give an example of the insidiousness, imagine a calculus problem that has about 6 or 7 steps required to solve this - calculate the derivative, then reduce it, and maybe a sum after that. Actuarial science problems are like that as well. The tests (at least the first two) are mutiple choice, 5 answers. Each “choice” has one of two situations for wrong answers. - The answer is the correct number but it’s the number you arrive at stage 5 of solving the problem (instead of the final stage), so you are tricked into thinking you are done when you actually have more steps to go - the number is what you arrive at when you make a common mistake - some combination of the above I will say I was told (at least) that passing one or two of the tests is enough to land you a full time entry level job (and entry level for an actuarial scientist is still really good)
- sjb554 8y ago
  If you think that's fun, the FSA exams are a whole new level of crazy. The math mostly goes away outside of financial statement type stuff, and in comes thousands of note cards on bland regulations (stuff like FAS106). But, people have to be weeded out in some way, amirite?

SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago

I also tried actuarial science out, just barely failing the first test twice (you need 6 out of 10 to pass, I got 5 both times). I say this as a software engineer: actuarial science is hard. There is a ton of material and the tests are easily the most insidious you will ever take. To give an example of the insidiousness, imagine a calculus problem that has about 6 or 7 steps required to solve this - calculate the derivative, then reduce it, and maybe a sum after that. Actuarial science problems are like that as well. The tests (at least the first two) are mutiple choice, 5 answers. Each “choice” has one of two situations for wrong answers. - The answer is the correct number but it’s the number you arrive at stage 5 of solving the problem (instead of the final stage), so you are tricked into thinking you are done when you actually have more steps to go - the number is what you arrive at when you make a common mistake - some combination of the above I will say I was told (at least) that passing one or two of the tests is enough to land you a full time entry level job (and entry level for an actuarial scientist is still really good)

sjb554 8y ago
If you think that's fun, the FSA exams are a whole new level of crazy. The math mostly goes away outside of financial statement type stuff, and in comes thousands of note cards on bland regulations (stuff like FAS106). But, people have to be weeded out in some way, amirite?