Alex Burosh attends DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. He is a senior majoring in Actuarial Science and minoring in Data Analytics and Data Mining and is Academic Officer for the DePaul Actuarial Science Club. Alex will graduate in June 2019. We spoke with him in March 2019.
Tell us about your experience at DePaul University.
It’s been pretty crazy, to be honest. I transferred to DePaul when I was a junior, and that’s when I began majoring in Actuarial Science. Since then, it’s been basically “get as much done as you can.” I knocked out two actuarial exams, I’ve been trying to get involved in clubs here, and I’m on an improv team. It’s really been a great experience so far.
It definitely can be challenging at times to balance everything, especially when you’re getting close to test time. The actuarial exams we need to take are external from school, so you’ve still got all your classes going on. I also work at an actuarial recruitment company called Ezra Penland Actuarial Recruitment. Additionally, I lead study sessions for actuarial exams through the DePaul Actuarial Science Club.
It’s a lot to balance, but there are a lot of resources to help, like professor office hours or the actuarial club. I have met so many friends through the club—friends I can always call up if I’m confused about something or someone who is just in the same boat as me and they understand.
I love DePaul’s location in Chicago. It’s one of the main reasons I chose the school. Lincoln Park is beautiful. When it’s not horribly cold out, I love to walk down to the beach with a few of my buddies. It’s a long walk, but the scenery is really pretty. It’s just great to be in the city. I also do improv, so the comedy scene here is awesome.
Why did you choose DePaul University?
Initially, when I started college, I went to Loyola University Chicago, and I was studying pre-med. In high school, I went through a lot of medical issues. I used to be super into running—running was my life. I overtrained though and had to have two hip surgeries when I was a sophomore. That was a lot to go through.
Through that experience, I dealt with insurance indirectly, and I ran into doctors that made a big impact in my life. It was so nice to have someone who understood and really cared about you. So I thought, “Okay, I love math and science, maybe I can try pre-med.”
But it really just wasn’t the right fit for me. I wasn’t finding the concepts that interesting. After some trial and error, I switched up my major after one semester to just mathematics. But I knew that I had to take a step back and figure out what was best for me, so I spent a year at community college just exploring all of my options. I tried everything from film to business to math, and I always came back to math. I’ve always loved math, and I just feel like that’s kind of my gift.
After I explored math careers, “actuary” always came up. I looked into the actuarial exams and what they cover and found that super interesting. DePaul is one of the few colleges in Chicago that has an actuarial science major, and since I always liked the city, I ended up sticking with DePaul.
What influenced you to pursue an actuarial science program?
One of my mom’s good friends growing up was an actuary, and my mom suggested I look into becoming an actuary. I learned that actuarial science was a great career and that it had lots of different kinds of math, which was nice because it would keep the studying interesting. Actuarial science was actually one of the first careers in math that I explored, and I found it so interesting that it has just stuck with me ever since; I haven’t looked back or really hesitated since then.
Why should other students consider a focus in actuarial science?
Initially, I really wanted to have that impact on someone’s life directly through being a doctor. In a weird way, insurance gives me an indirect path, where I know that I can be helping someone out by solving math problems. I didn’t think there would be a job like that, but I found one, and I’m loving it. It’s an interesting way to use the skill set that I enjoy to help people.
What has been your experience with the actuarial science program at your school?
DePaul has two actuarial credentialed professors at our university, and both of them have been helpful with preparing for exams and giving me the domain knowledge of insurance and all the mathematics that goes into it. They’re the cornerstone of this university’s program, to be honest. I also can’t stress enough how helpful the Actuarial Science Club was for me.
It’s been so nice to have all of these great resources that come with a big college. Taking advantage of these opportunities has helped me greatly.
What is your favorite class so far and why?
I’m taking a class called Loss Models, which is really interesting to me because I’m finally getting some hands-on experience. My professor will give us real world claims data to work with. One of our projects was for auto, and we had all of these auto claims handed to us, and we were told to figure out the distribution of this data.
As actuarial students, we know what to do when there is a distribution—we can find the expected value, we can do a lot with that information. But that transition from raw data into that distribution was something I hadn’t dealt with before. So the fact that I’m actually dabbling a lot more with Excel and R and these different forms of technology with data, I think that it’s really connecting the dots between my major and minor, and I’m getting a bigger picture of what I’ll be doing in the future.
What has been most challenging about studying actuarial science? Is there anything you wish you would have known ahead of time?
Majoring in actuarial science is a very big time investment. I knew that going in because when you look at the actuarial exams, it’s three credit hours, and it’s supposed to be 100 study hours for each credit hour. So for the first exam, that’s 300 study hours!
So the hours really do start to add up, especially when you’re pressed for time. The first exam I took, I started studying a month before. I thought my class would cover most of the material, but it was actually a lot of studying. It’s important to know that you need to space out your studying and make sure that you’re managing your time, while also maintaining that work-life balance. For me, if I can spread out my studying, I know that I can go out once a week. If I wasn’t as good at time management, I think I’d be a lot more overwhelmed.
Have you had any insurance related internships? If so, how was your experience?
I haven’t yet because I transferred as a junior, and I really wanted to pass exams as my priority. I knocked out two actuarial exams last school year and over the summer, and now I have a job at Ezra Penland. Through that job, I am learning a lot about the insurance industry as far as what are the growing markets for actuaries, where are these jobs located, what is the turnover, etc. When I entered that job, I didn’t know the difference between medicare and medicaid, and now I can tell you some of the details about the actuaries and their work on those.
I think the insurance field is always changing, and there is always a new problem to tackle, all of which I think is super cool.
What are the latest developments or trends in insurance?
There’s so much going on! If we just think about auto, we can think about how marijuana is becoming more and more legal and how that’s going to impact auto claims in the future. Cyber insurance is also becoming huge. We actually just had a guest lecturer from Aon in one of my insurance classes, and he was talking about their process and how different it is to price cyber insurance without historical data because it’s such a new and growing field. There’s even a lot going on just with life expectancy these days and with new healthcare and technology innovation.
I think the insurance field is always changing, and there is always a new problem to tackle, all of which I think is super cool.
What are your future aspirations or career plans?
Right now, I’m in the process of applying and trying to land that entry-level job. I was originally thinking that I would want to go toward the property and casualty route, but now that I’ve learned more about insurance, it’s a lot harder for me to choose. I’m really interested in life insurance as well.
What advice would you give someone interested in the insurance field?
When I started out looking into actuarial science, what caught my attention was the actuarial exams you hear about. You can easily just google information about the exams and figure out what each exam is covering, which will tell you what you’re going to be learning. And you can see if you’re actually interested in that because you’re going to spending hundreds of hours studying for these exams, so you’ve got to enjoy it!
I looked at the exams and they cover probability, financial mathematics, derivatives and all of these topics that sounded really interesting to me. At the time, they seemed like vague concepts that I’d want to know more about how they worked. Now that I’m actually digging deeper into these concepts, I’m glad I’m able to learn and understand how these strange mechanics work in insurance and business.
Do you have any favorite books that you would recommend for someone interested in insurance?
There’s a book called Achieving Your Pinnacle: A Career Guide for Actuaries written by Tom Miller. I thought it was interesting how he described what actuaries do and the different paths they could go on. The book is written from the perspective of someone who is in the recruitment sector, and it’s cool to see insurance and actuarial science as a whole.
If you wanted to dig deeper into the actuarial exams, there’s a small book called Actuarial Learning: A Guidebook to Exam Success and Workplace Achievement by Nicholas Mocciolo. It gives you a good idea of what you’re studying and explains some of the harder exams and why people find them more difficult.
