Description: Self-management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and direct your behavior positively. When you understand what you are feeling, you can effectively choose how to react. Knowing your individual tendencies can help you prepare for future events by consciously deciding to change or adjust your behavior when certain situations occur. The article shares strategies, examples and personal insights to illustrate how to develop the skill of self-management.

Description: Chairperson's welcome to the RS and thoughts about our future.

Description: A real life situation is posed involving a management, leadership, or other business decision, and readers are invited to submit the irresponses to "What Would You Do?" This issue’s case study involved a staff performance issue faced by an actuary new to management.

Description: With more than 24 years of experience in the reinsurance market, Bruno Freire is the CEO and one of the co-founders of Austral Re, along with Vinci Partners, a private equity firm. Austral Re is a Brazilian- based multiline reinsurer which that writes business across Latin America. It has grown organically throughout the last 13 years, and had its credit rating upgraded to A- in 2023 by AM Best (it also has AAAbr from S&P). Before joining Austral, Bruno had been a reinsurance broker at Aon Re for more than 10 years, having witnessed the opening of the reinsurance market in Brazil. As we will be seen in his interview the following, he believes in a data driven analytic approach, client focused but with an underwriting mindset, as well as a strong support from actuaries and technology as key instruments to run a reinsurance company successfully.

Description: Knowing how we and those around us are wired is very important for having successful relationships, whether it be family, a work team or any interaction that can be built upon for the future (e.g., a potential client). There are several models of human behavior inexistence. Like any model, none are perfect. However, having one that can generally guide us the majority of the time with simplicity, practicality and success is of great benefit.

Description: Article describes accomplishments as Chair during the year. Four accomplishments are mentioned: i) Actuarial Research Conference ii) Early Career Award, iii) Establishment of Outstanding Educator Award, iv) Push to create surveys from the section containing a reservoir of ideas that can be used for webinars, podcasts, etc.

Description: A memorial for a great tax actuary and colleague, Ed Robbins

Description: In the spring of 2019, Dr. Cai started to serve as the Actuarial Science Program coordinator at Salisbury University, a medium-sized public teaching school in Maryland. At that time, the program was small, with only two faculty members who focused on both statistics and actuarial science, with approximately 10 students. During the next five years, the program did make some achievements in curriculum development, student exam preparation, job placement, and recognition, but Dr. Cai continued to have a dream to make the program unique. Dr. Cai believed that the skill sets students learned, even from a small program, could enable them to compete with anyone on a global basis. In spring 2024, Dr. Cai advised a group of exceptional actuarial students to participate in the 2024 Society of Actuaries (SOA) Student Research Case Study Challenge (SRCSC), and the team won third place – —behind two teams from the University of New South Wales, Australia. This article is the story of the journey.

Description: Executives often tell subject matter experts such as actuaries, “You should think more strategically!” But the executives never define what they mean by “thinking more strategically”. This article defines the skills actuaries need to be perceived as being more strategic. It will provide practical steps actuaries can take to gain more strategic influence and escape the trap of being perceived as only a subject matter expert who provides limited strategic value.