Actuarial science personal statement example

Personal statement example

For most of last year I kept an exercise book under the counter of my uncle's phone accessories kiosk in Madina, and every time someone brought in a cracked screen I wrote down the phone model, the cost of the repair and roughly how old the phone was. I started because customers kept asking whether it was worth paying for a screen protector, and I wanted a better answer than my uncle's usual "it depends". By the end of the year I had about two hundred entries, and they had turned into the most useful mathematics I have done outside school.

The first thing I noticed was that repairs were not spread evenly. Cheaper phones came in more often, but expensive ones cost far more to fix, so a small number of repairs made up a large share of the money customers spent. I calculated an average repair cost per phone type and then estimated how often each type came back in a year, using customers my uncle recognised as regulars. Multiplying the two gave me something I later learned is close to the idea of expected cost. I then asked a harder question: if the kiosk charged a small monthly fee and promised free screen replacement, what fee would cover the repairs?

My first answer was too low. I had assumed every customer was equally likely to crack a screen, but the people most interested in my imagined plan were the ones who had already broken phones twice. When I read about adverse selection in an introductory insurance chapter I found online, I recognised the problem immediately. I adjusted my figures by treating repeat customers separately and adding a waiting period before cover began. I never offered the plan to anyone, since my uncle sensibly did not want to promise repairs he could not afford, but working through it showed me that pricing risk involves judging people's behaviour as much as doing arithmetic.

At school, Elective Mathematics has given me the tools I was missing. Probability distributions finally made sense when I could compare them with my repair records, and I enjoyed proving results about geometric series because they explained how small monthly payments add up over time. In Economics I wrote a coursework essay on why many traders in my area prefer susu collectors to bank accounts, which made me think about trust and the cost of saving. I taught myself basic spreadsheet formulas on the shared computer at a nearby internet café, paying for an hour at a time, so that I could stop adding columns by hand.

Outside the kiosk, I look after my two younger cousins after school on weekdays, which means checking homework and making sure they eat before their parents return. It has taught me to plan my own study in short, reliable blocks. I also play draughts with older men at the junction near our house. I lose regularly, but I have become better at thinking several moves ahead and at accepting that a sound position can still go wrong.

I want to study actuarial science because it joins the parts of my work I have enjoyed most: careful records, probability and decisions that affect ordinary people's money. I know my kiosk project was small and my data far from perfect, with no proper sampling and many guesses about phone ages. Recognising those weaknesses is part of why I want formal training in statistics, finance and modelling. I am patient with detailed work, I am comfortable explaining numbers to people who do not like them, and I am used to learning steadily with limited resources. I would bring those habits to a demanding degree and use them to understand risk properly rather than by estimate alone.