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Actuarial Studies (1 Viewer)

zhiying

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Nothing is amazingly complementary, but if I had to choose then either finance or financial economics. I'm doing financial economics and while it doesn't have that much direct applications in an actuarial role, I can see it being useful in an insurance company. Business law could come in handy, insurance companies like people who are aware of regulations and etc, but I've never done it so I can't comment.
 

mreditor16

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Nothing is amazingly complementary, but if I had to choose then either finance or financial economics. I'm doing financial economics and while it doesn't have that much direct applications in an actuarial role, I can see it being useful in an insurance company. Business law could come in handy, insurance companies like people who are aware of regulations and etc, but I've never done it so I can't comment.
Okay cool, sounds good. Thanks so much for helping everyone with their actuarial enquiries! :D
 

mreditor16

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Would you be able to explain the difference between financial economics and business economics?
 

zhiying

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Whats business economics? Is that a major at UNSW? Economics is so broad so I'll just summarise the 3 economics majors @ UNSW.

The financial economics major at UNSW is concerned with forecast modelling, by looking at past data. E.g. given the time series for GDP of last 30 years, fit a model to it, try to forecast the future GDP.

The econometrics major is about building models to explain results. E.g. you have a set of HSC results from a class, you take everyone's details like age, family income, race, etc. and you build a model to try explain the HSC results, such as how race affect HSC results. There's some forecasting involved too, like once you have a model, given a set of data on family income, race, etc., what do we think his HSC mark will be.

The economics major is a bit more general, I don't know too much about it but its more to do with economic theory and policies I think.
 

mreditor16

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Whats business economics? Is that a major at UNSW? Economics is so broad so I'll just summarise the 3 economics majors @ UNSW.

The financial economics major at UNSW is concerned with forecast modelling, by looking at past data. E.g. given the time series for GDP of last 30 years, fit a model to it, try to forecast the future GDP.

The econometrics major is about building models to explain results. E.g. you have a set of HSC results from a class, you take everyone's details like age, family income, race, etc. and you build a model to try explain the HSC results, such as how race affect HSC results. There's some forecasting involved too, like once you have a model, given a set of data on family income, race, etc., what do we think his HSC mark will be.

The economics major is a bit more general, I don't know too much about it but its more to do with economic theory and policies I think.
This is what I am referring to

http://www.handbook.unsw.edu.au/undergraduate/specialisations/2014/3155FinancialEconomics.html --> Financial Economics

http://www.handbook.unsw.edu.au/undergraduate/specialisations/2014/3155BusinessEconomics.html --> Business Economics

both offered as ASB majors (i.e. can be done in any asb degree) ....
 

zhiying

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Oh lol...its just a generic economics major going by the list of courses. No real specialisation. The 3 specialisations are what I mentioned before, I would recommend one of those 3, I don't know if you can get much out of this business economic thing, seems just like a mash of all the possible economics disciplines.
 

gahyunkk

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Finance is done by combining with commerce degree, although you can just do a single actuarial degree and double major in finance. Most people who do actuarial combined with commerce go for triple majors, for which economics is a good choice for 3rd option.
What's the difference of doing combined degrees and double majors? And what's triple majors? :O
 

Chronost

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What's the difference of doing combined degrees and double majors? And what's triple majors? :O
You can fit either one or two majors into a single degree, when doing a combined degree you're able to fit in one more because of the extra years and units you get, so you can choose to do a combined total of three majors.The triple majors usually happen when the degrees are similar and share similar complusory first year subjects otherwise people choose one major from each of their degrees that they've chosen in their combined degrees.
 

gahyunkk

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You can fit either one or two majors into a single degree, when doing a combined degree you're able to fit in one more because of the extra years and units you get, so you can choose to do a combined total of three majors.The triple majors usually happen when the degrees are similar and share similar complusory first year subjects otherwise people choose one major from each of their degrees that they've chosen in their combined degrees.
Oh so it's like
single degree=1-2majors
Combined degree=3majors
And i can fit in my actuarial partII course in fourth year of combined degree right?
 

zhiying

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Yes you can, that's one of the main reasons to people do double degrees with actuarial. However, depending on the major you might not be able to fit 3 in even if you are doing a double degree so be careful. E.g. if you do actuarial/science and you want to major in actuarial + finance + statistics, you will need to overload.
 

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