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Medical certificates:
To be fair to the honest 399 students, I assume that your MD, despite his/her
(required) College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario number, is like the one
above and feels that his/her time has better uses than guessing how you sick you
were on term test day. Please see course outlines below about my policy
for (usually not) accepting medical certificates. A medical certificate
usually results in a zero on a term test. |
Actuarial Job Market
http://www.beanactuary.org/ has some info about the US job market, which
appears to be more promising for entry level actuarial students than the crowded
Canadian job market. For a Canadian citizen with a math or act sci degree and a
letter offering US employment, a TN (Trade NAFTA) US employment visa is likely
to be obtainable but check it out first:
http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/types/types_1274.html Most employers like
to see some office work experience on your resume, preferably actuarial
experience - try very hard to get some work experience anywhere. Many recent graduates want to
live in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los
Angeles etc. but you might have a better chance of getting a suitable job in a
less popular city.
Another
way to get your resume noticed in the pile could be to attend
Toastmasters (public
speaking - preparation for client contact) and give enough five-minute speeches
to get a "Competent Toastmaster' certificate; Clubs close to
the campuses are likely to be particularly student-friendly: email and go and
try it.
The membership listing at
www.soa.org is very useful in a job search. Maybe look for excuses to send
an email to a potential employer. Don't send a lot of spam and
don't be upset if you don't get a reply. Everyone is busy and everyone quickly
deletes non-essential email, faxes and snail mail. But for example, maybe you'll notice at
www.soa.org a person working in investments in X-land and you are a fluent
X-ese language speaker and have taken some investment-related courses. Then try
sending an email
with a email 'subject' field such as 'X-ese speaker with investment skills',
attaching your resume. For greater visibility, you could snail-mail a hard copy
resume. A follow-up phone call is likely to be necessary - stay cheerful despite
hearing 'no thanks' a few times and, if your resume is OK, you may eventually
hear 'come and talk to us!'.
www.actuarialoutpost.com has job ads and, on the popular discussion board, a
lot of comments and information, much of it correct. See in particular the forum
named 'Careers-Employment'. An October 2009 posting from a Canadian ('up here')
sounded about right: "As for online postings, most of the people who
graduated with me and got hired never applied online. It was either through
previous internships or through contacts/referrals. It seems many companies are
now preferring this approach (at least up here) as it's often a safer approach
in terms of candidate quality + you don't have to sort through 100 CVs to find
people."
Here is placement rate info on an ad for a 'how to stay competitive' Act Sci
Club seminar in October 2007.
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