Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Say What Now?


Right now, I'm diving into that wonderful tome known as "Linear Algebra Made Easy". I'm trying to prep myself for what's going to happen to me in August when my Ph. D. classes start.

So far, it's been tough, but it's straightforward and I don't feel like I'm lost. However, the problem is that the problems do not have solutions given in the back of the book. So I don't know the answer to: "does every subspace have a subspace which acts as an additive inverse under subspace addition?" (If you know, please put the answer in the comments.)

I wrote an e-mail to Dr. S, who

a) was glad I was studying (I haven't done that much; I'm only just getting over my illness), and
b) recommended several books to read. Furthermore, he told me to think about a lot of subjects such as:

* how many ways can you interpret a matrix being symmetric or positive definite?
* what is an economic or probabilistic interpretation of the adjoint to a matrix?
* what are separating hyperplanes and linear functionals?
* How is a probability measure like a vector?
* How is a markov chain like a matrix?
* How does the concept of correlation relate to the eigen-structure of a covariance matrix....?

And I don't know what any of the above means! AAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Sick of It All


Historically, whenever I put a lot of effort into something -- exams, texts, major events -- what happens afterwards is that my poor overburdened immune system finally collapses.

That is what happened after Exam P. I didn't feel it until Monday, when I noticed that I had a sore throat. Then, it got worse and I essentially did as little as possible -- no study, no writing, nothing -- from Tuesday until Friday. This has been a lost week for me.

However, I am feeling better. It reminds me of the joke that being a graduate student is like the Seven Dwarfs.

You start out Dopey and Bashful.
Then you're Grumpy, Sneezy and Sleepy.
But then you become Doc, and you're Happy.

I think I got the sneezy part out of the way early.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

"It's Over"


I have a T-shirt with a statuesque woman in pig tails and "opera armor" with her mouth wide open, in mid-song. At the bottom of the shirt are the words, "it's over".

And, dear readers, Exam P is over.

My impression is that with the new superrrrr computer system, you would have a guesstimated result lickety-split. However, as the last screen popped up, you got the words, "in seven weeks, candidate numbers will be released". So, no, not until approximately July 13th will I know the results of Exam P.

Taking the exam on the computer is a bit weird. There are a few problems with this system. First, they never give you enough pencils. At the testing center, I got two pencils to work with (can't bring in your own pencil, y'know -- there might be answers written on the side).

When I write, I bear down HARD on pencils. Sharp pencils turn to dull nubs within 15 minutes. So I had to waste 30 seconds of valuable time requesting 2 more pencils. You get your own scratch paper, for obvious reasons, but you have to turn it in later.

The other problem is that you can't scribble on the test itself, without leaving marks on the screen.

The test was 180 minutes, 30 questions, so about 6 minutes to solve. And let me tell you, I used every bit of those three hours. Didn't have time to check my earlier work, and some of those problems I found the solution to almost at the last minute.

It was hard. Those 30 minutes go by fast.

According to the oath which I swear by clicking a button, I am honor-bound not to tell you anything about the contents of Exam P. At least, not until the end of the month by which time everyone should have taken this particular sitting of Exam P.

I try to put the actual test out of my mind, so no private e-mail. As my wife says, "D for done", referring to her initially poor academic career. All I need is a 6 out of 10 from the SOA/CAS, and I've passed.

Now, what's my life going to be like for the rest of the summer? I'll be studying linear algebra on my own in preparation for graduate school in August 2007. Still obstensibly looking for work, although all is quiet on that front. And finally, I might post some actuarial thoughts and articles, like the oft-imitated (but never equaled) Actuary.net .


P. S. Got grades back on all three of my courses. A, A, and A. Thank goodness.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Exam P Tomorrow

Ugh. I'm depressed and studied out. I just want it to be over.

However, I found a new blog to read about Insurance Law . It will definitely be added to the ol' linklist.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Two Words


Where have I been? Two words. Exam P, May 18th, and I'm less than 48 hours away from it.

Wish me luck.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Let X Equal Casino Earnings....


A little vacation for the blog, as my wife and I go to Lake Charles for three days.
She's going there on business, and we'll visit a riverboat casino and try to help the local economy.

I will try to prove to my wife that for the random variable X, where X equals customer earnings from a casino visit, that E(X)<0. It's a tough battle.

Monday, May 08, 2006

L'Homme Qui Dormir

I have now finished the third and last of my final exams.

This was the exam from Dr. S, in Math Foundations. The exam consisted of:

a) six multiple-choice questions,
b) some think-about-em questions
c) three essay questions, choose one

The six multiple-choice were based on problems from Exam P. I got 5 out of 6, and I blew the one about the Gamma function but I knew how to set it up correctly. (It was based on adding up a bunch of Gammas and invoking the CLT, but somehow, my alpha and beta were wrong.)

The think-about-em questions were:

1) Find f(y) where X=ln Y and f(x) is given. (Easy).
2) If P(a<=x<=b) = 1/b - 1/a, and find f(x), if x greater than or equal to one,
3) Describe the major distributions based on coin flips. (No problem, but I didn't do the Beta distribution, because he didn't discuss it.)
4) Some weird conditional density function that I didn't do.

The last question was an essay question that asked one to justify pricing by expected loss. I gave him two pages on it.

I would write more...but this is a recreation of the first post, which Blogger ate. More later.

Friday, May 05, 2006

Two Down

I am pretty much wiped out.

I just finished my elementary probability test. (In a weird side note, I had the advanced probability course before I had the elementary one.) It was definitely challenging. Not much in it but "hat problems", i. e.

"A coat check girl is handing out hats to customers. If five customers give her their hats, and she hands them back at random, what is the probability that exactly two customers get their correct hat?"

Hat problems, special subcommittees were some Democrat didn't want to serve with some Republican (so, how many combinations), red and blue balls dropped in an urn, pulled out, blue balls added, weird dice rolls and all the enjoyable elementary probability problems you've come to expect. And, of course, good ol' Bayes and his theorem.

The test was 100 minutes long, and 95 percent of the class stayed there until the end. Tough exam. I feel I did well; but I really can't say.

Two days ago I had the intro statistics final. That one was a hard one, all sorts of problems about confidence intervals and how to make them narrower (he didn't go over these specific problems in class, but I doped them out). And it's multiple choice, so you can't get partial credit.

If my last two finals were so hard, I wonder what Math Foundations of AS is going to look like? That one happens Monday. Then a trip to Louisiana for my wife to gamble and then, on the 18th, Exam P.

However, like any college student, I had my runaround with the registrar. They were putting a hold on my future registration for classes until I could prove that I had taken courses to show that...I can read and write. My wife says, "you should just sit for those courses and take them." If this happens to me again (this is the second time it's happened), I might consider it.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

The Final Day

It's 10:25 am. I have now been up for 25 minutes.

Yesterday was the final day of regular classes. I have my first final exam tomorrow. I've already put about 4 1/2 hours into studying for it, and I'll finish up today and part of tomorrow on it.

We got more materials in Dr. N's class. Some problem sets in intro probability to do.
I spoke with a couple of the undergraduates regarding the class -- the usual before-class chatter. (They always have a lot of questions about the actuarial exams.)
At our university, we are required to rate our instructors before we get our grades. So I'll give you the plusses and minuses of each of them.

Dr. N

Plus: A very nice man. The quizzes every week keep students focused and studying. Seems helpful.

Minus: His command of English is not that great. A lot of the undergraduates found it annoying. I am not claiming that you have to have a masterful command of English to be a good professor -- some of the best professors out there are English-as-a-second-language speakers. But I think it's paramount to have a good English speaker for an introductory level course.

Furthermore, we "ran out" of course material, covering only the first five chapters of Hassett and Stewart, and then treading water for the last three weeks of classes. We not only ran out of course material, but this lack of planning was reflected in the syllabus. (In short, it was built into the course.) I don't know if the earlier instructors did it this way, but the class loses focus when they know that nothing new will be covered for the last three weeks.

Dr. S

Plus: Brilliant in math, probably the best of the mathematicians. Very smart in finance as well. Does not build his test around the "90=A, 80=B" scale but is willing to curve and recognize effort.

Minus: I like the man. I can see what he's trying to get at. As Robert Pirsig might have said, he's trying to turn us into thinkers instead of grade-grubbing robots on automatic pilot. The problem is, it's hard on the first class that gets challenged that way. Since no one knows where the grading scale is, or how well they have to do on a test to succeed, it creates panic in every grade-driven individual in class -- including myself. He's introduced interesting material -- proof of "expected loss", hedging, filtering, an intro to ruin theory in our final class -- but most students, me included, unfortunately only want to know one thing -- "is this going to be on the test?" And if it isn't, they lose interest.

Furthermore, some of the work he puts on the board is...well...wrong. He thinks like a brilliant person, "I can go back and fix the details later". Unfortunately, since we've never been exposed to some of this material, the details have to be done right. It can be very confusing.

Dr. Z

Pluses: An expert in his field. Homework is automatically checked with a "100 percent" as I think he's too busy to look at it. Tests are multiple choice, review is very easy. No surpises.

Minuses: No surprises. He rarely, if ever, diverges from the course material or tries to present it in a new light. No new philosophy is represented. In short, if you can read and understand the text, there's no reason to attend any of his classes.

Tomorrow, I'll probably report on one of the obstacles I'll face in a successful graduate career. A clue is in the first line I've typed.