Description: Write up about SOA’s donation to Boston Public Schools.

Description: Teaching enterprise risk management ERM in higher educational institutions as a mainstream subject is emerging. Risk management is traditionally taught in disciplinary silos without considering the multidimensional aspects of risk necessary to steer the entire business. This study identifies and focuses on the essential elements to develop a curriculum of ERM from a multidisciplinary perspective. The purpose of this article is to outline the contents of an ERM unit for academic business degrees. The article includes the author’s view and experience in designing and delivering an ERM unit for a postgraduate finance and risk management degree at his current academic affiliation. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: Expanding Horizons recently had the opportunity to interview Wenjun Zhu, the winner of the Society of Actuaries’ (SOA’s) third Actuarial Science Early Career Award.

Description: Traditionally the SOA formulates pedagogic excellence in terms of the Marzano Taxonomy. For example, the "analysis level" consisting of generalization, specification, classification, contrast, matching, and error identification, is considered superior to the "retrieval level" consisting of rote memorization such as recognition, recall, and using. In this presentation, we first show that pedagogic excellence can be equivalently, but more simply, formulated in terms of executive function and goal-setting. Here executive function refers to problems requiring multiple mental modalities - such as, formal, verbal, computational, and graphical - for their solution. Goal-setting refers to the skillful breakup of a complex problem into a sequence of subgoals each of which is clearly formulated, challenging, but achievable timely. Light examples from the literature illustrate these concepts. Five "challenging FM problems": reinvestment, refinancing, multiple rate/deposit problems, pricing deferred bonds using a term structure, and obscure loan problems, illustrate the following fundamental techniques of goal-setting and executive function: i) a fellowship approach to teaching preliminary exam material, ii) using subgoals to give difficult homework, iii) alternating between different mental modalities to achieve elegant brevity in solutions, iv) goal-setting reflecting familiar vs. new, and v) skillful definition of unit subgoals.

Description: Society of Actuaries' Hong Kong Ambassador’s Report, discussing the primary objectives of the 1998 activities launched in China

Description: A student describes her experience attending an SOA Center of Excellence school.