Best attitude for Actuary? (1 Viewer)

[no1gives]

Hey~ As a year 12 student who is now considering a possible actuary degree, I was just had a few questions about actuary... (was initially aiming for med, but now thinking of actuary/engineer following the umat rip)

1. What kind of attitude is good for an Actuary? I'm doing quite well in MX2 and MX1 and Maths is my favourite subject. However, I've read on a few threads that MX1/2 isn't a very good indicator of being good at Actuary. I'm not sure if it's doing well in Maths that makes me like it, but I prefer MX2 over MX1 simply because it's more interesting, and I love doing hard questions in past papers and learning new tricks to use and stuff... (especially when my friends can't get it xD)

2. I hate statistics... Yr10 statistics killed me (well I just hated it, I didn't really do that bad in it), basically adding the stuff together manually and working out standard deviation, manually finding quartiles and stuff. I heard the first year of Uni actuarial course has hard integration techniques and probability unseen in the HSC syllabus, and I was wondering what the main part of Actuary is? Is the statistics similar to in high school or is it completely different in the sense that you use integration and it's not just a trek of manually adding numbers and stuff?

Any help appreciated~~~

 

[leehuan]

Let me tell you one thing.

For me, statistics at uni felt literally 10x better than at high school. Analysing distributions can actually be a fun thing to do, if you force out the fun. Rather than plugging numbers into your calculator to find mean/stddev you now use calculus to help you out.

But I mean, if you're truly passionate about maths, you have met the main criteria. Stats is probably the only reason why MX1/MX2 is not a good indicator of suitability to actuarial in my opinion, but at least it means you can handle the difficulty of the maths.

Surprisingly, at UNSW first year uni maths taught to actuarial is basically what all engineers learn with a tiny bit more!

 

[no1gives]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Its really reassuring (I guess) that the statistics is different and (in a sense) more fun. xD

BTW, what do you think about Actuarial as a job? Is the passion for maths something that makes everyday job-life more fun or does it become mundane and boring? I heard that a maths interest in a maths job may not necessarily make the job more enjoyable or something... Also, I heard one of the top banks in Australia only have 12 actuaries in total! Is job-prospect a real problem in a field like Actuary?

 

[RenegadeMx]

Let me tell you one thing.

For me, statistics at uni felt literally 10x better than at high school. Analysing distributions can actually be a fun thing to do, if you force out the fun. Rather than plugging numbers into your calculator to find mean/stddev you now use calculus to help you out.

But I mean, if you're truly passionate about maths, you have met the main criteria. Stats is probably the only reason why MX1/MX2 is not a good indicator of suitability to actuarial in my opinion, but at least it means you can handle the difficulty of the maths.

Surprisingly, at UNSW first year uni maths taught to actuarial is basically what all engineers learn with a tiny bit more!

second this, hopefully the planned syllabus changes fixes hs stats

 

[RealiseNothing]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Its really reassuring (I guess) that the statistics is different and (in a sense) more fun. xD

BTW, what do you think about Actuarial as a job? Is the passion for maths something that makes everyday job-life more fun or does it become mundane and boring? I heard that a maths interest in a maths job may not necessarily make the job more enjoyable or something... Also, I heard one of the top banks in Australia only have 12 actuaries in total! Is job-prospect a real problem in a field like Actuary?

Well banks aren't exactly the main place for actuaries to go for work.

 

[leehuan]

Oh yeah. I heard that the majority of our kind go into life insurance.

 

[BandSixFix]

Positive attitude