We’re excited to bring you our first guest post, written by fellow actuarial author, Lee Trawick.

Lee Trawick’s background:

Lee lives in Irving, Texas. Lee attended the University of Texas at Dallas where he studied math and majored in statistics. He took his first actuary exam as a junior in 2008 and never stopped studying for exams until he attained his ASA in 2015. During his exams, he wrote a book about actuarial study strategies titled, “Top Secrets for Passing Actuary Exams.” After getting his ASA, he left the actuarial profession to explore design.

We hope you enjoy this guest post by Lee which offers another perspective on effective exam studying!

 

What I learned from writing my book

In 2015, I published a book on actuarial exam prep strategy titled Top Secrets to Passing Actuary Exams where I interviewed the brightest actuarial exam takers in the world. I believed that if I asked the brightest students about their best practices and then followed their advice, I would achieve top results. I didn’t have to be a genius to replicate their pass rates. I just needed to follow their orders.

I did this, and I was amazed at how much I improved.  What is interesting to note, is that many of these gifted exam passers gave me similar advice to what Roy and Mike offer in their own book.  These approaches don’t go about reinventing the wheel, but they certainly go far beyond your basic study approaches.  I was amazed at the similarities in how these gifted exam passers approach these actuarial exams.

They taught me their best practices for studying math and, since then, my learning style has never been the same. I learned the power of efficient learning by taking in information in a more brain-friendly way. The brain wasn’t designed to read a dictionary and have every word memorized by the end, but that’s exactly how I used it when I first began studying.

The brain has optimal paths to integrating information, and the brightest students find those optimal paths. They learn how to learn in the fastest and most effective way. This is an extremely valuable skill for actuarial exams because there is an enormous amount of content.  I wish I would have had this kind of guidance when I first started actuarial exams; not only would I have gotten through them faster, I would have enjoyed my studying more!

 

Three years later, has my learning style changed?

On a flight to California, I wanted to read a textbook on civil engineering. I’ve never taken a course in civil engineering, and I wanted to integrate the information as quickly as possible with the least stress. In college, I would have approached the task like this:

“I want to learn what’s in this textbook, so I’m going to read the whole thing from left to right, page for page.  I will read it several times to commit it to memory. I’m going to take detailed notes (several pages), and I’m going to solve every practice problem at the chapter ends.”

Compare that to my thought process now:

“I want to read through this textbook. It would be insane to attempt to master every concept. It would also be insane to expect my brain to remember every detail on every page. The brain likes high-level concepts first and details can be added afterward. With that in mind, I am going to stick to high-level skimming. I might slow down and read the first few paragraphs, word-for-word, for each major section but after that, I am only going to read the first sentence of each paragraph.

I understand that Parkinson’s Law says that a task expands to fill the deadline it’s given. I don’t want to spend a lot of time reading this book, so I’ll set a 3-hour deadline. I have 3 hours to read through it. Brain, I’m talking to you. That means you have 3 hours to pull out all the key information, and it’s pencils down after that.   During this time, I will ask myself questions to stay focused on high-level concepts and stay engaged.”

What happened after three hours is that I was done reading. I had an excellent high-level understanding of this branch of civil engineering. My brain wasn’t strained, and I wasn’t stressing about some obscure detail in the first chapter. I was done. I had one page of notes that summarized all the key concepts, which was perfect for my project.

 

My suggestion for you 

My suggestion for you is to think about how you learn. Do your study methods enable you to pass every time? How well are your tools working for you now? Chances are that you’ve never considered this question. I never thought about it either until 3 years after I graduated.

I encourage you to experiment with different ways to integrate information; staying open-minded may be the best thing you can do for yourself on this actuarial journey. Go read a book by someone who is an expert in studying. Roy is definitely an expert on passing actuary exams (being the youngest FSA in SOA history), and the book he wrote with Mike is certainly a great place to start.

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