I am going into my senior year of high school and after doing some researching I’m interested in the actuary career. Both schools I’m considering offer an actuarial science major (UT Austin and UT Dallas). However, since I know so little about the profession should I choose to major in something like mathematics in case I later decide that actuarial science isn’t for me?
In most schools, Actuarial Science if offered, is a sub-concentration of a Math degree so you will be fine. Even if the concentration doesn’t exist, you can piece it together yourself. Take CS courses (Intro Programming,Data Structures & Databases) anyway since entry level actuary jobs seem to want a lot of coding experience. SAS, R, Python and Excel wouldn’t hurt. Those could change by the time you graduate though.
Drill down to the Math department’s website for each school you are interested in and make sure they at least have an actuarial club or you will have no support when studying for the P or FM exams.
My S20 is considering it and will definitely not be an AS concentration. He will stay with Applied Math and/or CS. He passed the P exam in January (I offered to pay since he just finished taking Mathematical Probability and wouldn’t have to study much). He will join the actuarial club this year. They eat lots of pizza, study together, bring in speakers, and take trips to insurance/consulting companies.
The really nice thing about being an actuary is there very little prestige bias as opposed to much of high level finance. Pass (easier said than done) exams, have appropriate internships, be able to write and speak well, and you are better than most applicants for entry level jobs.
Actuarial science is essentially applied mathematics.
http://beanactuary.com/ can help you with what the job entails.
Preparation for the actuarial exams does not necessarily require an actuarial science major, but is math and statistics heavy, along with some finance, economics, and computing.
If you like math and statistics, you might enjoy economics.
However, not all colleges offer economics majors that use a good amount of math and statistics. For example, Penn State and Florida State do not even require calculus for their intermediate economics courses or for the major. A math-liking student interested in economics may want to look carefully at the economics course offerings to see whether they will use math or handwave and tiptoe around math that would otherwise be useful.
Look at the Society of Actuaries website. They list the Universities that have math/stat/business programs that contain the specific courses that are covered in the actuarial exams. There are 3 levels of universities, the highest is Actuarial Center of Excellence ( something like that). Those schools offer the most courses that align with the curriculum for the Society of Actuary exams. Its nice to be able to just take the proper courses and then get college credit as well as sit for the actuarial exam (following your usual finals) and knock off several of them in undergraduate school. After that can study for the rest on own or go to a graduate program off of the list to finish the rest of the exams and complete your credential(s.)