There is a fine line between extremely informational and just plain boring. In the book Actuaties' Survival Guide, Fred E. Szabo attempts to walk that line but unfortunately falls into the category of just plain boring. All the information on Actuaties you could be looking for is there but it's written like a textbook and could scare young college students away from the profession.
Before reading this book I had a fairly decent idea of what an actuary did. I knew that a great deal of what they do revolves around statistics and that their primary job was to assess risk in order to determine premiums for different clients. It had already occurred to me that actuarial science was not the most interesting so I kind of knew what I was getting into when I started this book.
Fred E. Szabo had three goals in mind when he was writing this book. His first goal is to give the reader a clear understanding of what an actuary does and how they do their jobs. He wants the reader to determine if this is a career that they would want to pursue. His second goal was to help students prepare for the road to becoming an actuary mainly on how to pass the rigorous exams that must be taken in order to become an actuary. And his final goal, was to provide information on job opportunities for actuaries' throughout the country. Most of which are with insurance firms.
For the most part, Szabo is successful in achieving these goals. He does a really good job of informing the reader of actuaries' jobs and the difficult path one must take in order to become an acutary. It was never the content I had a problem with, it was the way he went about writing the book. Like I said before, this book was like reading a textbook on biology. All of the information you are going to need on the subject is there but there just is not anything there that pulls you in and sustains your attention for more than five minutes at a time. There are definitely times when the book drags and it can really get to be a chore to read.
I think the main problem was that it was just a book on a dry subject and it is hard to romanticize something as boring as actuarial science. I get the feeling Szabo did not want to give the false impression that actuarial science was more exciting than it really what it really is. Which could in fact, be the reason for the text book style of writing that he uses.
I do have to give Szabo some credit though. He took on a task that no one has really ever attempted before. He wrote a book about actuarial science for the general public. And it helped me come to the conclusion that I really do not want to be an actuary after all. After reading the section on all of exams that must be taken and how many people fail them, I realized that I just don't have the desire to pursue this career.
So I definitely can't say that I would recommend this book for the average person to read. The only people that I would recommend Actuaries' Survival Guide to are people who truly are considering actuarial science as a profession and have no idea if it really is something that they want to do. Other than people like that, no one should read this book unless you suffer from insomnia and need a quick remedy.
