Though Cristie Labus sometimes needs a moment to explain what she wants to do with her life, it's a mistake to call her indecisive. Unlike many college students, she picked her career even before enrolling at the University of Illinois.
Her choice, however, defies easy summation. The graduating senior from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences laughs as she describes the looks she gets when she names her field: actuarial science.
"People look at me and say, 'What do you want to do with that?'" Labus says. "I say, 'I want to be an actuary.'"
Indeed, Labus carries an air of certainty that's well-suited, because an actuary is trained in part to analyze risk, probabilities, and uncertainty, and to minimize adverse financial impacts of expected and unexpected events. In LAS, future actuaries study in the Department of Mathematics.
Employed primarily in the insurance industry, actuaries may estimate the impact of seatbelt laws on automobile losses, design retirement plans, estimate earthquake damage, project the costs of disease epidemics, determine a company's worth in a merger or acquisition, determine the price of insuring unusual events such as satellite launches, and more.
A more detailed definition might require concepts such as power laws, Pareto distributions, statistics—stuff to make the head spin, or, in the case of Labus, make the eyes light up. She's always run with the math crowd, as her father is a certified public accountant, and her godfather, who worked with actuaries and knew how mathematically intense the profession is, recommended the career to her.
It's a changing field, traditionally occupied by men but seeing growing numbers of women. As she prepares to join the consulting firm Ernst & Young in the fall, in Chicago's Sears Tower, Labus says she felt only respect and encouragement while studying in LAS.
"It's such a welcoming environment," Labus says. "I've always been treated as an equal."
