'08 VA WR Deion Walker (Signed LOI to ND)

[goldandblue]

Ha Ha, good post 41!

[m-araim]

Originally Posted by GoIrish41

Thanks for dumbing it down for me Gip. I really had no idea what actuarial science was. Hopefully Deion will come to ND and we'll need someone with his math skills to keep up with his receiving stats.

He could study statistical tendencies of opposing teams!

[goldandblue]

Good idea, give him a film tape and some paper and pencil, then we will know what our defense should plan for!

[leprechaun4life]

An actuary? Wow, he must really like statistics. Personally, I have a hard time staying awake in that class.

[GoIrish41]

He's like Rainman. "I'm an excellent receiver."

[IrishRamMan10]

Originally Posted by leprechaun4life

An actuary? Wow, he must really like statistics. Personally, I have a hard time staying awake in that class.

I dropped that Class this year.... made my senior year a hell of a lot easier haha

[Z-Bo]

Originally Posted by GoshenGipper

From what I've heard it's extreamly hard, but starting pay for the low end ones are around 75K+ a year, and the mid level guys get 200K+ a year, and it of course gets even higher if you work for the bigger insurance firms and advance in the field. Actuaries are the people that create the probability/risk tables that insurance companies utilize to set rates.

There are other career options. Actuaries don't just do that. It's the area people most commonly link actuaries with, though. If you've seen Along Came Polly with Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston, Ben plays an actuary. Except, it's Hollywood, so Ben uses the RiskMaster computer software program to calculate risk tables for him.

I'd be surprised if someone from Notre Dame started at only $75,000 as an entry-level actuary. Career advancement as an actuary can be really fast, or really slow. The first road block is passing the first two exams. Once you do that, it's the other exams and commitment to pass them that separate the obscenely high paid quants from the low end quants.

Statistics is a cool subject. However, it's often taught in a completely boring, error-prone fashion. Typically, at colleges where there isn't a professor who specializes in statistics, someone who hates statistics ends up teaching it... and usually does a poor job. It's a real treat to learn statistics from someone who is passionate about it -- there is no comparison! Dispassionate teachers of statistics often view it as just crunching numbers. However, it's really about asking questions and forming models that can reliably predict the answer to a family of questions you might have.

People who can create really good models are therefore the best statisticians. Models aren't right or wrong; models are more or less useful. There are a lot of classical problems in game theory, for instance, that demonstrate poor models for understanding famous puzzles, like the Prisoner's Dilemma. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, a model that takes a suboptimization approach ends up with both prisoner's being punished rather severely. However, a global model for the problem shows that if the prisoner's remain silent, then both will be punished only lightly.

Deion, if you are reading this, best of luck!