Uni Stuff > Actuarial Studies
Actuary?
Deleted User:
Do you have to really like maths?
I really like the commerce-side of it (I'm extremely passionate about economics), but when it comes to maths, it's just meh to me. I mean, I'm not the worse at maths - probably above average - but I don't particularly enjoy doing it (hence why I'm not that great at it). The only area that I do like about maths, however, is probability, which is what actuarial studies is all about, right?
Greatness:
Yeah you do, if you don't you'll find a lot of it a bore. But I've only done the first year intro to actuarial unit so far. Give it a go in first year and see if you like it or not, then decide what you want to do afterwards that's what I'm doing :)
I found a lot of the insurance stuff a bit boring, 'calculate the premiums for a person aged 50, with a sum of $200,000 payable in 15 years'. I found the first half of the unit more interesting, it had more financial security calculations. I did finance 1 so I was familiar with a lot of the securities we talked about and we used formulas in finance where you plug in numbers, whereas in actuarial we derive formulas to calculate payments, interest rates etc I found this part pretty interesting - being able to turn a series of payments into a single formula then apply probabilities and what not to it. Overall, it's pretty interesting and gives you a taste of what actuarial studies is like - also you would have to put in a fair bit of work to do well in the unit, probably do more than the tute work and any extra questions he provides.
Deleted User:
I don't really understand how transfers or switching courses work. Do you have to start all over everything again if you decide to switch courses? Like if I choose to study actuarial studies at Melbourne and I don't like it, is it easy to switch to ecofinance later on?
Greatness:
Well, the thing with the Melbourne model is that they only offer general degrees: Science, Biomed, Commerce, Arts etc then you do postgraduate courses like honours/masters/MD/JD etc
If you want to do actuarial studies then you do Commerce and take the actuarial studies major. If at the end of first year you you decide to change majors, then you can easily transfer to Finance/Eco. You don't miss out on any prerequisite units if you want to take this pathway, although the only thing is you would now be doing the math stream for the quantitative requirements for the commerce course. That is, instead of doing QM1 and another quantitative unit in 2nd year, you would be doing 2 math units in 1st year and another 2 in 2nd year - you do these as breadth units too. It would only be a problem if you plan to do Accounting/Finance with accreditation since the pathway for that is pretty restricted, you would have to do extra units to satisfy the accreditation prerequisites I think.
Transferring is when you want to change from a Commerce degree to say Science. If you choose to do this then you can transfer internally at Melbourne or transfer out of Melbourne into another course at another university. It depends on the course, you can get some or all of your units credited so you wouldn't have to start from scratch.
taiga:
In all honesty if you think you are going to get a 25 in specialist, unless you are willing to work extremely hard in university, I would not take up actuarial studies. It's incredibly difficult, and I've seen some of the brightest students get crushed by it and get to the point where they want to drop out.
Be careful of what TrueTears says, he is on a different level to us :P
I think you've really got to like your maths and be able to maintain a very good study ethic throughout university, particularly for your actuarial subjects.
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