actuary

An actuary is someone who finds oppurtunity in risk. From your ordinary bank accounts to your stock market portfolio to the property you own, virtually all investments have some inherent risk. it is the job of the actuary to mitigate that. Acturaies are also the guys who design your insurance policies, decide how much premium you pay and find the right balance between offering the policyholder a fair price and making sure, at the same time, that the company makes a decent profit. Yes, actuaries need not be guys alone. they can be women too.  

I just mentioned the women part because of this mail i got recently from my yahoo school group. this old classmate started the mail with “Dear GAGs” and went on to tell us that it has been a long time since our last reunion and blah blah blah. but what the fuck is gags? after subtle enquiries with equally perplexed classmates, I finally asked the author himself for an explanation. “Oh that, that is GUYS AND GALS dude,” was his reply.  These engineers are really smart, you have to admit.

i was a member of our batch community on orkut. was because i am not in orkut anymore. this is one of the threads there:

school v/s colg

how many of u think that u wud miss colg more that school .. (those who miss colg more may as well get the hell out of this community).

I really hadn’t thought about it till then. but the answer was obvious. my school life wasn’t all that great and all i wanted when i was there was to leave the place as soon as i could. maybe it wasn’t the school that i disliked. i hate trivandrum. i hate its people. and i will always hate them for making the best years of my life miserable. so, compared to those years, anything that came after was like manna from heaven.

I am an actuary now. you just need to clear one paper of any actuarial society to be called that. you need to clear all (12 to 15, depending on the actuarial society) to be a fellow of the society and around 6 to 9 to be an associate. it is a big deal, being in one of the best-paying jobs in the world definitely is. but every few days, i realise the amount and years of work that i would have to put in and the mental picture of me in my mind quails. kinda shrinks like it was a plastic mannequin which has been deflated.

my classmate here was analysing my character from my handwriting yesterday. his uncle, who was with the delhi cops, had taught him, he said. didn’t know cops knew all this. anyway, his appraisal:

Your actions and thoughts are extreme. (his exact words were, “you are extremist in your thoughts and actions,” but i am assuming this is what he was trying to say). you have a tendency to leave things half done (i was reasonably sure he said that because i left my french course at the alliance francaise midway). but whatever you do take up in earnest and finish, you do very well.

i do like hearing good things about myself. even that half-done bit sounded quite cool. i am a dood, macha.