10.27.2011

Day 159

I'm pretty exhausted, so a short update today.  Unless I start ranting.


We had finance this morning.  Mr. Frye decided to have our exam a week from Monday.  There were no complaints at all.  In fact, we were all pretty happy with that.  In between classes I studied with Dustin and Tim for life contingencies.  I've been trying to do more of the problems in terms of random variables because that seems to be the best way of doing problems of variance.  But it's really hard to start doing things differently now that I've been studying for this exam for a week.  Ugh... there's just so much.  I understand the ideas.  They seem so simple.  It's just the computation and the uncertainty of what questions he will ask.  Because the questions he asks won't necessarily be ones that we've seen before since the book only has a few different questions.  And we've all done the problems in the book numerous times.  But... we just want more and different questions.  Just looking at all the different possible things that could be asked.  I just want it to be over at this point.  And I want to do well.  Because I feel like I understand everything for the most part.  I mean, I don't know of anything that I can't do.  I'm just afraid of the uncertainty.  And I really want to do well in this class so that hopefully I can get an internship and then a job.  But currently no one really seems to want to hire me as an intern, which is incredibly disheartening.  Especially when I see a lot of my friends getting interviews.  I'm very happy for them, I really am.  It's just difficult.  And everything is so stressful.  I guess I'm coming to that point that everyone does (or maybe should) reach where you realize that doing your best isn't necessarily good enough.


Anyhow.  After life contingencies (where we just worked through a few problems and am now even more terrified), I taught my class.  That was interesting.  We went over the homework for way too long, then I briefly talked about expected value.  I didn't have nearly enough time to talk about it because of how long we spent on homework.  We did play a game to help them get the idea down.  I think they had fun.  I didn't have enough time to really explain it though.  Some of the students followed... but I know that most of them think I just did some magic to get an answer.  So I might include a question but just not make it worth as much.  We'll see.  It just doesn't seem right to include a heavily weighted question that we talked about for 15 minutes in one class and over which they had no homework.


After class I went to my office and Dustin and I studied for a while.  He tried his best to explain a different way of doing the problems that would make finding the variance easier.  And I think now I'm finally starting to get it for some of the cases.  Our exam covers annuities and insurance premium calculations.  And most of the annuities have a generally straightforward variance, but the premiums get kind of tricky because there are no straightforward formulae to find the variance.  But I think that at least for the premium variance, I can use Dustin/Dean's method.  Hopefully.  Because otherwise I'm toast.  There are a few select instances where I would know what to do using different formulae, but in general it can't be done.


Anyhow.  After we'd studied for a while I came back and took a break.  Then I had some dinner.  I had my frozen meal... bad choice.  I will certainly not be doing that again.  It wasn't bad I guess.  It just wasn't very good.  So yeah.  Maybe next time I'll just get a frozen pizza instead.


After dinner Timbo and Dustin came over and we studied for a few hours.  I really feel like I've studied all that can be studied.  So I'm going to get up early in the morning and study a bit more.  Then... hope that's good enough!


I just need to remember that (and this is purely for my own benefit so that hopefully writing it down will help me remember everything) for any given expectation of a future loss (gross or net) will be the sum of each year's possible payouts (that being the present value of the sum insured and any other expenses incurred minus all of the premiums that the insured life has paid until that time) times the probability of dying during that year.  This makes finding the variance easy because you just square the non-life contingent portion.  And since the expectation of a future loss random variable will generally be 0, you don't have to worry about subtracting off the square of the expectation.  Yup.  I think that's about it.


And now I'm going to bed.  Good night.  If I survive through my life contingencies exam tomorrow at 10 I'll be sure to update tomorrow night.

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