Early Career Profile: Russell Yang Gao
- Class Year: 2007
- Position: Actuarial Associate
- Department: Life Insurance and Financial Services
- Company: Tillinghast-Towers Perrin
What he does:
As an associate in actuarial consulting, Russell enjoys the diversity of his work. His first few projects are to: project and consolidate income statements and balance sheets for two merged insurance companies, evaluate European Embedded Value of an offshore insurance company, calculate quarterly reserve for a life insurance company, and construct stochastic scenarios for variable annuity valuation.Math on the job:
Interest theory and basic probability theory are the foundation of any actuarial work. Both descriptive and inferential statistics are used frequently.
Russell's background:
Russell was born in Zhengzhou, Henan, China. He graduated from No.1 High School of Zhengzhou in 2004 and came to WPI to pursue his undergraduate study.
As an actuarial major at WPI, Russell dove into actuarial, statistical and financial courses. In addition, he enjoyed a number of writing courses and worked as a tutor at WPI's writing center. He served on the Presidential Commission to review the Sufficiency requirement at WPI and on the senate of the student government.
During his first summer internship, Russell completed a mortality study and reviewed the credit loss experience for a major insurance company in Hartford. During his second summer, he interned at the New York headquarter of a global reinsurance company, where he reviewed assumptions for a block of traditional life reinsurance policies and constructed models for reinsurance contracts. Through the internship experience, he discovered actuarial work is much more than number crunching and hence much more interesting than he originally expected.
Russell completed his WPI Major Qualifying Project in London, England, where he worked with traders at Bank of America to price credit default swap indices and asset swaps.
Russell was the first WPI student to receive the Wooddy Scholarship, a global award given by the Actuarial Foundation. He served on the Editorial Board of The Future Actuary, a newsletter published by the Society of Actuaries.
Advice to students:
- "Don't be afraid to ask questions. Intellectual quest often starts with silly questions. So find answers rather than simply accepting them."
- " We should all have a little actuary inside. Ask yourself, what will my future look like in four years?"
- "As a small college, WPI offers a rich selection of courses and project opportunities, which leads to infinite career possibilities. Even if you've decided to be an actuary, life, health, property and casualty, consulting, asset management, actuarial software solutions are all open choices. Take the time to explore and make best of what's available."
- "Passing an exam is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to secure an internship. Employers prefer people who can interpret numbers, make judgments, and present results in a convincing way. In short, they want people with abilities that a computer lacks. Take every class project as an opportunity to develop those skills.
- "Find your own model! Not in a mathematical sense, but in a sense that you should find your own passion and do things in your own way."
Last modified: March 15, 2007 14:57:10