No. 44: A Brief Note on Studying

On Studying

When I began the actuarial exam process a few years ago, I stumbled upon a personal essay from the SOA archives about Andrew Lin, a brilliant student who became full fellow at the age of 20. Even today, we actuaries and actuarial students consider this an extremely rare feat and an extraordinary display of intelligence. The most talented actuaries tend to achieve fellowship at the age of 25, about three years after college,  so I’d imagine that you could count the number of 24-or-younger FSAs on your left hand. Anyway, when reading the article you shouldn’t focus on how Lin achieved the designation so early – but more on how he, as a non-native speaker of English, motivated himself to learn 25 words of English each night for 9 consecutive months. 25 words doesn’t sound like a lot and you can’t hold an intelligent conversation with such a limited vocabulary. However, over the span of 9 months Lin would learn approximately 6,750 words. Had he continued the ritual for another two years he would have learned over 20,000 words – the size of the average vocabulary of a native English speaker. In addition to vocabulary, he devoted each night to learning non-school related material that he found interesting.

I’d say the article has left a lasting influence on the way I learn. Ever since I started my job in March, I decided, time permitting, to devote each night to reading something I found interesting at a rate of 100 pages per week. I started with the book A Mathematician’s Apology by G.H. Hardy and then moved on to Hackers by Steven Levy and shortly afterward to Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I got to the point where Dagny Taggart started having an affair with Hank Rearden but I later saw the book as dull and intellectually unstimulating (sorry, Ayn Rand fans) so I switched over to Norman Davies’ Europe, A History since I never took European History in high school. I figured that, in a manner similar to that of the preceding paragraph, if I read 100 pages a week I would have read over 5,000 pages after a year. Since I like to read textbooks (I have a Sociology book lined up after Davies), and each textbook is roughly about 1,000 pages, I concluded that I could read a college semester’s worth (or maybe even a year’s worth since college courses rarely cover the entire book) of material each year. This, in addition to the Actuarial curriculum and the projects I learn at work, makes for a very education-heavy lifestyle that I’ve come to enjoy.

I like to alternate between “Heavy” material and “Light” material as I complete each book. “Heavy” material consists of textbooks or academic material whereas “Light” material consists of pleasure reading, like novels. In an effort to speed up my reading (I don’t plan on doing only 100 pages a week forever), after I finish a “heavy” book, reading slowly to absorb the material, I start reading a “light” book and read it as fast as possible. For instance, I consider Davies as heavy material. The next book (a light book), Kingpin, tells the true story of Max Butler, aka “Iceman,” a computer criminal who stole 2 million credit cards and sold them on the black market. Another former criminal, Kevin Poulsen, now a journalist, wrote the book so I think this will present a unique perspective into the cybercriminal underworld. The book consists of about 250 pages, which I plan on reading over the span of a week (so about 2.5 times the speed of heavy material). The easily digestible nature of light material makes it an ideal source for developing my reading speed. After finishing Kingpin, I plan on going back to “Heavy” material, in this case – Sociology by John Macionis (since I never took a sociology course), except at a rate of 105 pages per week. The cycle continues in this manner until I can no longer read the required pages within the allotted amount of time, the point at which I reduce 10%-20% of the required page count and start the cycle again.  Unfortunately, this week marks the first time in 6 weeks that I’ve fallen behind schedule – by about 50 pages. I’ll let you know next week if I’ve caught up.

In addition to all this, I still have my actuarial material to study, along with the math/computer projects I do on the side when I’m not studying for exams. I’m still in the early stage of exam preparation and most of it consists of the rote memory of basic theorems and definitions that serve as the foundation of model construction. I felt inspired by Tesla’s ability to memorize complete books and for a while I wrote down some theorems (see “temp_mem_bank”) in $latex LaTeX$ using my RStudio server and tried using a random number generator to generate a theorem or definition number (say, Definition 2.5 from Klugman) and then trying to write down that theorem or definition verbatim, including the punctuation marks. Right now I’ve done this at a rate of 3 theorems a day but I find it really taxing. I feel a slight improvement in my memory but if I find that I haven’t gone anywhere after a month I might have to ditch this method for practical reasons to devote more time to solving problems.

As a side note, my tubulars arrived last week and I rode them last Saturday for a 3 hour training session back in Clear Lake. They feel fantastic. I had them up to 120 psi but it felt like I was riding at the comfort of 90 psi on clinchers. The wheels were extremely fast. They look pretty sweet too.

Cronus Ultimate with HED Stinger 6 Tubulars