What is it like to study insurance and financial mathematics in the MAST programme?
We are a branch of applied mathematics, which means that we have some preliminary courses in probability and statistics. We focus on problems that arise in banking and insurance businesses, so everything is motivated by real life, rather than the theoretical questions in pure mathematics.
Because of this, I think it's easier to get motivated by the topics in this field. We are constantly developing the courses, and if there are difficulties, we will adjust the workload to be manageable. One of our priorities is that the students feel it's possible to reasonably study what we offer.
Who should consider these studies?
The studies are suitable for anyone who wants to work with mathematics but doesn’t want to be a professional mathematician, teacher, or researcher. If you are this person, then banking insurance is a great field with many job opportunities. There are occasional research positions as well, but those are, I would say, rarer than in other fields.
What kind of career paths does studies in insurance and financial maths open up?
Many career paths are possible. The most obvious ones are in banks and insurance companies. In fact, many of the courses in insurance and financial math can be used to cover study modules of the Finnish actuarial qualification degree (SHV-tutkinto in Finnish). But that's not all of the available options. We also have people that graduated who work in consulting, or even in applied fields that may not be directly related to banking or insurance like electric companies and computer science.
What do you find most interesting about this field of research?
I think the big reason why I chose this field was its connection between certain and uncertain. As an example, let’s say we have an insurance contract with a known event such as in the case of a fire. We don’t know if the house burns down or not, so that outcome is random. But nevertheless, the insurance company collects a premium, which is a deterministic given number. In this, there is a connection between the deterministic number and the uncertain outcome, or the randomness of the fire happening.
This interconnection of deterministic effects connecting with something that's random has fascinated me. Especially now, when I know more, I’ve become more interested in risk management overall, or understanding what scenarios are possible for a given system and what to do if they occur.