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Actuary

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You'd think that someone who sits at a desk all day working with numbers would have a pretty tame job. In some ways they do, in others they don't.

"A disaster could happen in 20 years or it could happen tomorrow," says Wally Robinson, an actuary.

Robinson has to be ready for anything. Earthquakes, fires, hurricanes -- you name it. It's his job to predict the chance of these things happening and, what's more important, how much it's going to cost his company.

While insurance salespeople are seen as the backbone of the industry, actuaries are the brains that make the companies run successfully.

Every day, an actuary tries to predict the future for the insurance company. The idea is to predict catastrophes to make sure the company will be able to cover a customer's losses if there is a claim.

The challenge is to make sure the company charges a competitive and fair price while still making a profit.

Another part of the job is to spot potential new markets in the insurance business.

Robinson has to ask himself how much money someone might need for extended health-care coverage, and then how insurance rates should be priced.

"You have to be able to focus on the particulars, like the statistics, while keeping your eye on the big picture," Robinson says.

The big picture for actuary Louise Anderson included some soul searching. "I was trying to evaluate what I wanted to do with the rest of my life," she says. After 12 years of working as an actuary in life insurance, she decided she'd had enough.

She went back to school to get her master's degree in health services research. Now she works for a managed care health insurance company in Minneapolis.

"I didn't fully understand how messy health care is," she says. "There's a lot of cleanup to do." She explains that the whole health-care industry has trouble with health-care information. "I feel like I go too deep [into details] sometimes," she says.

When Anderson isn't health-care housecleaning, she's dealing with things like figuring out rate impacts when employees want to change benefits. She has to figure out costs per person per year, which she says isn't always easy.

"There's simply no data for some things, like alternative care," she says. Anderson also spends quite a bit of time at her desk working on spreadsheets -- computer programs that put figures into tables.

Where did she get her knack for math? "I've always been good at it," she says.

She's not the only one. Robinson graduated from university with a degree in math. He says he took a summer job with an insurance company before he even knew what he wanted to do. He worked for 25 years as an actuary before working in human resources management for his company.

"Telling people at a party what I do for a living is the quickest way to kill the conversation," Robinson jokes. "Most people don't know what actuaries are, so I tell them I'm a mathematician who works for insurance companies."

There's more to life than math, though. Anderson says students interested in becoming actuaries shouldn't neglect courses in literature and the humanities. "It's too easy to become one-sided," she says.

Robinson agrees. When he goes into work each day, he has to have more than just numbers on his mind. Politics, the environment and social issues all affect the outcome of his projections.

"It helps to keep up to date on current events," he says.

If you're interested, Anderson suggests visiting people in this career to see where they work and what they do. And she says the option of an internship, whether paid or not, "really paves the way."

Newcomers often work in many different areas of insurance such as life, casualty, automobile and pensions.

"There is a lot of room to move around," says Robinson. "But there will be fewer and fewer backroom numbers people."

The profession is changing, insiders say.

As insurance companies begin to compete with banks for business, and as the industry becomes more regulated, actuaries will be more important to insurance companies.

It could mean that being an actuary wouldn't be such a party joke any more. In fact, Robinson is counting on the day when telling people he's an actuary will be a great way to start a conversation.

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