Luke Roth
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What he does:
- Luke is an actuarial student at Milliman's Seattle Health practice. He gets a wide variety of work, including rating, reserving, and many other projects involving programming, data analysis, and healthcare-related issues. He enjoys the fact that his managers and mentor take an interest in his continued education, and always take the time to explain exactly what his work will be used for, even if it is not ncessary that he see the greater picture. He also has a lot of resources available, such as fellow employees, study materials, and study time, to prepare for the actuarial exams.
Math on the job:
- Luke has worked on a number of projects that involve topics in finance and probability. In general, it is important to be able to understand the steps necessary to go from a starting point to an ultimate goal, to be able to create solutions to minor problems that arise during projects, and to avoid careless mistakes. It is also important to be comfortable with computations involving very large data sets. A solid understanding of some DBMS is the cornerstone for a lot of his work.
Luke's background:
- Luke graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics, in Spring, 2005.
- At the beginning of Luke's sophomore year, he was still planning to major in creative writing or English. He was influenced to major in math by one of his calculus professors. The summer before his senior year, he learned about the actuary profession and chose his remaining classes based on this career goal. He began studying for the first actuarial exams throughout the rest of that year. He also attended test preparation seminars offered by a graduate student in statistics.
Advice for students:
- If you are thinking of pursuing a career in actuarial science, Luke recommends focusing on taking classes that include topics from the tests, but to also take classes that you find interesting and fun. Another recommendation is to learn about programming languages such as Fortran or Visual Basic. One could also learn a DBMS program like SQL or SAS. Microsoft Access and Excel are also excellent tools.