Warning: The following blog post is not particularly entertaining,
silly, or similar to my previous posts in any way. I’m trying a different, more
serious approach. (Who knows how long that will last).
During the past couple of months, I’ve been researching possible
first cars for myself. From convertibles to sedans, off-roaders to motorcycles,
I think I can say that “I’ve seen it all”. One of the most important
characteristics of the car is that it must have low insurance rates. I’m sixteen
and, as many people know, men under the age of twenty-five are consistently
charged more for car insurance than people of other demographics: middle-aged women,
teenage women, elderly men, etc. Angry with what I previously perceived as “age
discrimination”, I started to wonder, “who decides these insurance rates
anyway?” After doing a little research, I found a group of people called
actuaries. Actuaries use recent statistics to predict the likelihood of future
events. They estimate the probability and economic cost of natural disasters,
design business strategies to minimize risk and maximize profitability, and
produce reports to explain their proposals and calculations. I wondered, “Aside
from insurance, how else does Actuarial Science affect my everyday life?”
One way is through basketball. Our team examines our statistics
and an opponent’s stats to determine how we should play an upcoming game. For
example, during the one of our conference tournament games last season, we
evaluated the statistics of our opponents. Their top scorer was a 6’5” center
scoring over 20 points per game. We also saw that most of these points were
scored right after offensive rebounds. To decide how we would guard this
player, we looked at the statistics of our own team. A common trend in
basketball is that the taller players tend to get the most rebounds. We decided
that the best matchup for this opponent would be our 6’2” center who averaged
the most defensive rebounds per game on our team. We predicted that this would
be the most efficient matchup because it would limit the opponents number of
rebounds, therefore limiting their scoring.
I’ve always been pretty set on going to college and pursuing an engineering
degree. This past summer though, I went to a camp focused on actuarial science.
I learned a lot about this new subject that, before about February, I didn’t even
know existed. One primary takeaway from this experience is that actuaries make money. Not to say that engineers don’t make
money, but the work to income ratio as an actuary is much more favorable. Maybe
I’ll toss engineering to the side and work at Geico one day.
This is an interesting approach to blogs. When I read this post it made me think of a stream of consciousness, pursuing each thought and whatever it led up to. You went from your dream car to basketball statistics to college in a span of 3 paragraphs. It's actually interesting to think about how our mind works and why you chose to go from basketball to college and not something like sports.
ReplyDeleteIt was interesting to hear your thought process and how you related your pursuit for a cool car to actuarial science. The basketball story is also a good one. I have never thought about the broad range of topics "risk management" applies to. I have always considered it to be entirely in the realm of insurance, but it is true that sports teams could also use these techniques to limit the effect of an opposing player.
ReplyDeleteThis is really cool, I'm glad you were able to discover this seemingly niche interest that appealed to you. I have some questions, though. What exactly distinguishes actuarial science from any other sort of study of probability? Is it just that it's used specifically for risk and insurance? If so, then how does it apply to basketball as well? Regardless, this is really cool and I like how this one thing intersected with so many different avenues of your life.
ReplyDeleteI think you brought up some interesting questions in your post. I was surprised by your writing style for this post, because it jumped from one topic to the next, but it was very easy to read. Actuarial science sounds really interesting and it's great that you found another field that you might pursue.
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