Someone once told me that an actuary is a "pension engineer", which frightened the bejesus out of me as I was contemplating doing the actuarial science degree at the time (I did a pure mathematics one instead - much more exciting!)
So, if you are wondering what on earth an actuary is, here's a much better description from Society of Actuaries' What is an Actuary:
The future is full of uncertainty. Some of the events that can happen are undesirable. "Risk" is the possibility that an undesirable event will occur. Actuaries are experts in:
- evaluating the likelihood of future events,
- designing creative ways to reduce the likelihood of undesirable events,
- decreasing the impact of undesirable events that do occur.
The impact of undesirable events can be both emotional and financial. Reducing the likelihood of these events helps relieve emotional pain. But some events, such as death, cannot be totally avoided. So, reducing their financial impact is very important. Actuaries are the leading professionals in finding ways to manage risk. It takes a combination of strong analytical skills, business knowledge and understanding of human behavior to design and manage programs that control risk.
Wikipedia also has a good Actuary entry too.
As you can see, this description is extremely relevent for being a pet insurance actuary because there's really no other insurance that I know of that people get so emotional about. What do you think?
BTW, another tidbit about being an actuary - the actuarial profession has consistently been rated as one of the top five jobs in the United States according to Jobs Rated Almanac. To learn more about this, click here.
And finally, there are many actuary jokes since actuaries are stereotyped as being more boring than accountants (so we must be bad!) Here's one of my favorites to keep you amused:
What is the difference between an introverted actuary and an extroverted actuary? An introverted actuary stares at his own feet during a conversation, while an extroverted one stares at the other person's feet.
I left the male reference in the joke because there are still more men than women in the profession. Check out this site for more groaners.
