look at me thread

[Japher]

I wouldn't "waste" a year if you know you want to be an actuary

[KrazyHorse]

Kuci, was the exam as easy as I said it would be once you actually put your mind to studying?

[Kuciwalker]

No, or at least it didn't feel like it. My difficulties fell mostly into two categories:

1) I probably should have gotten more practice problems in before taking it. Even when the way to get to the answer is obvious, it takes surprisingly long to actually compute, and if you do do something wrong, you often have to start over from the beginning.

2) There are some problems that I can easily reduce to some sort of closed-form identity, but not one that is tractable to simplify by hand (e.g. 6th-order polynomials). There is often a trick and/or an alternate approach, but it's not always obvious.

edit: given infinite time I would have little difficulty deriving all of the actual math on the exam from first principles.

[MrFun]

congratulations

[Asher]

Congratulations. But I'm concerned for your mental well-being with this actuary stuff.

[KrazyHorse]

BTW Kuci, you should go to sleep.

[Kuciwalker]

Oh, something that ****ing pisses the hell out of me: my calculator's bond worksheet DIDN'T WORK. It would always give answers that were just a few percent off, and I never figured out why.

[Kuciwalker]

BTW Kuci, you should go to sleep.

Probably.

[Guynemer]

[Wiglaf]

What the hell? Why do bird catchers need to know math, and why is the thread starter becoming one? For what it's worth, my first job out of college was interning for a Senator who got me laid regularly.

[Guynemer]

And people say Congress isn't good for anything.

[Japher]

How much does it cost to take those exams?

[Kuciwalker]

There are 8 more exams to go before I'm actually certified.

****. They appear to have changed the requirements again. 8 more exams to get certified as an associate, 6 more after that to become a fellow (real actuary).

[Kuciwalker]

How much does it cost to take those exams?

The exams themselves are $175 each, at least the early ones that are offered through computer-based testing (through Prometric, which also does GREs and stuff). The total cost of the suggested textbooks for the FM exam was like $600, though I only bought one set (which was perfectly designed for the exam) and that was $100 IIRC. I didn't buy any textbooks for the probability exam, but I did pay $40 for an online sample exam service thing (they had a whole bunch of sample questions in the style of the test questions, and would generate sample exams from them).

On the whole, I'd call it cheap given the payoff.

edit: Woah. The next exam I take is $375, and the exams to become a fellow are $1k each.

[Jon Miller]

If you pass, can you do it with no degree?

JM