Description: Section chairperson takes a look back at how he became involved, through volunteering, with the SOA and encourages section members to do the same.

Description: The author explores the nature of risk in the actuarial profession and suggests that all of us actuaries in the world are connected by this common bond.

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

Description: An article that explains the importance of lifelong learning--education shouldn't stop once you've attained your FSA.

Description: Actuary of the Future Section Chair Dave Snell shares some insights on the section's 18 years and provides a preview of the year to come.

Description: The author describes her experience for the past year as the section council intern for the Actuary of the Future Section.

Description: The author provides highlights from a March 2012 seminar on longevity risk sponsored by the Actuarial Society of New York (ASNY).

Description: Evan Borisenko looks at previous challenging environments for the life insurance industry, such as the a period of severe stagnation in the 1930s, the increased inflation in the 1980s and a catastrophe like the Spanish influenza after the World War I. Evan explains that "while each event described above challenged the life insurance industry in a unique way, each event stimulated an equally unique solution." The article concludes that we "fight to repeat history" in a way that we as actuaries should be able to propose unique solutions with when faced with crisis in the future.

Description: This article gives a summary of the articles to be presented in the Spring 2013 issue of the the AoF newsletter. It also introduces some of the new initiatives and programs underway in 2013.

Description: David Januszewski looks at the the development of open source software in statistics. By comparing the virtues between SAS, the proprietary software and R, the open source software used by statisticians, he thinks that open source software "can and does coexist with the proprietary software" and "both have a purpose. "He further looks at the availability of the open source software in the actuarial profession and does not see "open source software sweeping across actuarial science like it has with other fields". Dave explains the possible uses and virtues of the open source software to actuaries and asserts that it may be beneficial that the open source is used together with the propriety software.