Chronology

I originally enrolled at UMass Amherst as a civil engineering major in 2005. After two semesters of academic success to earn Alpha Lambda Delta Honors, I felt uneasy going into my sophomore year as I knew I did not understand my course material, and my success was solely due to my ability to memorize and pattern match. It took an immense amount of effort, and I did not want to do that any more. Ultimately, I did not feel I was growing, and I found it difficult that I could not understand why I would get things wrong. Even more frustrating, at times I would not understand why I got something right either. If I was going to spend this effort, I wanted it to count for something that mattered to me.

I spent my sophomore year reconsidering what I really wanted to do. I thought I could be a U.S. attorney and eventually a Federal Judge where I could make a positive impact in our society. I enrolled as a double major in philosophy and legal studies, and I consider this period to be the most honest work I have ever done. It is also the most difficult work I have done. Before starting college, I struggled with reading comprehension, usually scoring well below the median in courses and standardized tests. My writing was similarly poor. In high school, I would look at a book 3 times, spend several days writing a book report, only to receive a poor grade and a demand to do it again, but no guidance how.

I spent most of my time up in the W.E.B. DuBois library where, ironically, I was an academic tutor during my last two years for the courses I did not understand from my first two years. I would spend several hours each day doing my best to genuinely understand an author's ideas and intent. I uncovered several biases and emotional preferences that kept me blinded and stagnant. I wrote with similar frankness, detailing what I read and understood, but inserting my own viewpoint where pertinent even if it conflicted with the esteemed authors or the professor. I remember receiving a paper with a paragraph crossed out and No! next to it. But I took it in stride because I could feel I was improving, and it was a relief to be myself. Ultimately, my reading and writing became exceptional, and consequently improved my ability to understand very difficult things efficiently. I use these skills to accumulate knowledge in various domains which greatly contributes to my resulting success.

When I graduated UMass Amherst in 2009, the United States was in the Great Recession, and law school graduates, in particular, had a very difficult time finding work. In addition to the economic situation, technological improvements were making the law profession more efficient so fewer lawyers were needed. I may have still tried to become a lawyer in spite of these challenges, but I was also disillusioned of any practical hope that a career in law would amount to any substantive changes for the impact I hoped to achieve. More specifically, I had learned through my legal studies major that laws do not necessarily change the attitudes and behaviors of people. In fact, a lot of people do not even know the law, and generally behave in accordance to multiple influences, one of which could be the law.

I was no longer pretending everything was alright. It became clear to me that to bring about a good society, I had to understand the human beings who create and sustain it. Real change could only arise by fundamentally impacting people universally. There are major fields of study in psychology, sociology, political science, economics, etc. that deal with aspects of this question. But they are more empirical and segmented, and I am a philosopher who wanted to solve this problem comprehensively from first principles. And I went deep as Descartes. I wrote a few quick essays to summarize the thoughts here.

Practically during this time, I needed a career. I thought public policy would give me the most impact, and I enrolled at the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs. However, this was short lived. There is a limited market for public policy. I would have to be on a budget and that was okay for me, but it was not okay for my parents. I asked them to give me time to pursue this, and if I felt I could not amount to anything by 30 years old, I would do something more lucrative. But my life changed when I was involved in a car accident while I was serving as an AmeriCorps VISTA Fellow. My parents canceled a vacation to come take care of me and my situation. At that point, I decided to let my own ambitions go so my parents can live with less anxiety.

My goals are clear at this point. I will seek financial security and abundance, have a family, and build a stable home. I planned to live the normal life. My first goal was to adopt a cat. I had wanted one since I was a child, but I did not know if I could reliably provide for one until then. Her name is Kitty, and she is still with me today, having traveled to 7 different states.

I also met my wife shortly after. She was the president of a Chinese conversation club, and I was looking to practice speaking Chinese. She was also the one who encouraged me to pursue actuarial credentials, knowing that I preferred self-study. My life was unfolding as planned. However, irony seems to enjoy my company, and my life to date became even more unconventional.

Although I missed working on my prior ideas, and felt a little guilty to neglect them and ignore problems facing society, I did not know if my thoughts were legitimately good. I developed everything through first principles and assessed against my individual experience and the experience of others. But I did not have resources, nor the interest, to apply scientific principles of experimentation. I thought there was already enough work to simply call things out how I saw them. The most discouraging aspect was that I had no peer or mentor. I could not find anyone who wanted to talk about these ideas with me. They were all doing their own thing. If I did briefly find some conversation, my thoughts were so unique and controversial that others could not reconcile them with their entrenched point of view. Over time, I found that my ideas will hold up in practice and they laid the foundation for my life today.

I found immediate success in my transition. I passed the initial 4 SOA / CAS shared exams easily, mainly relying on my ability to memorize and pattern match. I did understand things roughly, and used that when problems were tough, but I mainly relied on the coachingactuaries.com website to smash a variety of practice problems. I eventually found employment at National General Insurance where they sponsored me to continue my studies, and I was so grateful for the opportunity to live a normal life that I worked with enthusiasm and studied diligently to quickly pass more exams without a single failure.

My wife had less success, however. She had a dream to pursue a PhD program, but she was only accepted to masters programs after Indiana University. After 2 more years, her most promising prospect was a 2-year research position at Stanford, after which she would apply again. I was reluctant at first to put my life on pause (remote work did not seem possible back then), but I also remembered having dreams like hers, and I decided to support her opportunity at Stanford. I also saw this as an opportunity to really test my theory on learning and education.

She struggled to understand concepts, and this was a familiar problem to me. But her study domain was very unfamiliar to me. In the two years at Stanford, I worked with her to help her learn and study like I did while she shared her knowledge with me as we worked on her problems. We were exhausted afterwards. She was eventually successful to gain admission to a PhD program at Stanford. You would think life is okay now, but she no longer wanted to do it! She had the dream to go simply because it was some goal to work toward when she studied in China. When the goal started to actualize, she realized that she misunderstood that life. She did not know exactly what she wanted, but she knew she wanted to pursue something else. Irony again.

After Stanford, I resumed my actuarial career, but I am different now. I have positive reinforcement, and I am confident to be more aggressive in my application. I easily passed CAS Exam 6US during the Fall 2018 sitting, and I attained my Associate (ACAS) credentials. I decided to take the remaining 3 CAS Fellow exams, Exam 7 and Exam 9 in Spring 2019, and Exam 8 in Fall 2019. I completed the FCAS exam sequence within 3.5 years (excluding my Stanford break) of study because I passed every exam on my first attempt and there are a few sittings where I took multiple exams simultaneously. Fewer than 0.1% of exam takers finish within 3.5 years of study.

For those unfamiliar, candidates fail actuarial exams more often than they pass. This is generally expected so much so that companies who sponsor actuaries pursuing these credentials have designated procedures when candidates do not pass an exam sitting. Employers commonly provide about 100 hours of study time per exam, while candidates are generally advised to budget 400 hours. CAS Fellow exams were only offered once a year in the Spring or Fall sitting, and failed attempts could add years to the Fellowship qualification process. My strong exam record helped me readily secure a role at Root Insurance in 2019, one of the most innovative Insurtech start ups at the time.

The main issue facing candidates is a lack of available practice problems compared to the earlier computer-based exams. In addition, CAS Fellow exams require written solutions and explanations which are graded on reasoning ability in addition to calculations. Candidates are expected to be able to apply syllabus material in unfamiliar situations and some questions involved applications that never appeared before. As a result, solely relying on memorization and pattern matching made it difficult to pass. My success is due to my genuine attempt to understand the knowledge in the exam syllabus. I am one of the few who would read comprehensive notes or the source material thoroughly. I did practice exam questions, but I would not try to figure it out myself. I let the source material guide me, and if I could not understand the solution within that context, that is a signal for me to take more effort to understand the source material.

I joined the actuarial department at Root Insurance to work on predictive modeling to set insurance prices for our customers. However, I soon found myself working closely with the data science department and was quickly adopted by the Vice President of Data Science. I made significant contributions within my first 6 months there. I streamlined the modeling and evaluation code, turning a shaky multiday process into a 10-minute, one-click execution. In a large discussion with a boardroom table of data scientists and analytic professionals, I proposed the solution to the "overcorrection problem" identified by the CTO. Folks could not figure it out for weeks in spite of daily meetings, and some frustrated people said I was lucky, but it was a straightforward solution to me that reflects a decade of disciplined intellectual work. When the Vice President was asking our team for research ideas, I gave him a whole whiteboard of ideas, which he delegated to other data scientists and used to advocate for a larger budget and department.

Part of my success is also due to my intensive study in statistics at Stanford, and this knowledge was integral in landing the job at Root. I remember the Vice President of Data Science gave me progressively harder questions in our interview and mentioned to me that no actuary had made it this far. Having accomplished the requisite study to be a credentialed Fellow, I devoted my time to other pursuits. The work you see in my Projects and Study sections were completed during this period. I worked on them thoroughly even if I had no direct applications in my current role as I knew it would lay the foundation for me in future endeavors.

I would learn progressively more advanced material once I mastered basic data science. It was not long until I studied neural networks and applications for computer vision and natural language processing. Again, my confidence and ability come from having repeatedly entered unfamiliar fields and learned difficult material successfully. The advent of Generative AI exemplifies my ability to ingest new material and adapt. The subjects have changed, but the ability I developed through earlier work continues to serve me. I am excited to see where this takes me, and I do not plan to stop learning and building.