Actuarial and Business Applications

Program Overview

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Experience Pays!

Salaries of Actuaries with 5 Years of experience and having passed 5 exams are in the $70-105,000 range. The average salary of a Quantitative Analysts (with typically less than 10 years of experience) is $82,000. Skills that increase pay for this job are VBA, C++, Phython, Matlab, and Financial Modeling.

The Actuarial and Business Applications concentration combines mathematics and computing fundamentals with quantitative business applications.  The resulting degree prepares graduates to think critically, communicate precisely, analyze thoroughly, model realistically, and solve problems creatively.  These skills prepare graduates for many exciting career opportunities and also for graduate work in either business or an applied area of mathematics.

One possible career is to become an Actuary.  Actuaries use mathematics, statistics, and financial theory to analyze and quantify the risk of business decisions.   Many actuaries work in the insurance industry, an industry that thrives on risk.  During the first several years of their careers, actuaries pass a sequence of certification exams. Graduates of this program should be ready to hit the ground running by taking the first two actuarial exams.

Other possible careers include building and solving mathematical models to help managers make the best possible decisions.  Such professionals are typically called Analysts, Business Analysts, Quantitative Analysts, or even Decision-Support Analysts.  They typically use multi-purpose tools such as Excel, MATLAB, Mathematica, C, or C++.  They may also use special-purpose tools such as statistical packages like R, SPSS, or SAS, optimization packages  like AMPL or CPLEX, or simulation packages like Simio or Arena.  Our graduates are exposed to many of these software environments.

See Program Catalog

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  • Actuary
  • Quantitative Analyst
  • Business Analyst
  • Financial Analyst
  • Data Analyst