I’m currently a 2nd-year statistics major at Cal Poly and I’m looking to declare a minor soonish. Right now I’m considering economics or actuarial preparation but I was wondering if anyone had some other ideas. I don’t know what I want to do after school but I’ve been considering taking the actuary route, obviously, but I also enjoyed the economics classes I took in high school. I know computer science would be really good to pair with statistics but I had to take a programming class last quarter and I don’t think I have ever hated a class more so that’s off the table. Any insight or advice is more than welcome. Thank you!
Won’t need much coding for actuarial, liabilities all produced with proprietary software, Excel, etc (my actuarial science degree only required one programming course.) Also, helpful to know Finance since pension actuarial will be dealing with assets, financial reports, etc. Also, will be doing a lot of data manipulation and analysis, so Data Science would be good minor.
If you like econ then do econ
This really should be driven by your interests. There’s no right or wrong answers here - your minor doesn’t have to be related to your career goals or anything. You don’t even have to have a minor; you can just take extra classes based on interests or skills you want to build.
However, if you are interested in being an actuary, a minor in business can be useful since a lot of the actuarial exams have business-related concepts and questions on them. Economics might be similarly useful. If your school has an actuarial preparation program, I’d explore taking at least some of those classes since I think that getting actuarial credentials can be done partly by the classes you take.
2 of the courses required for actuarial science are econ. Along with a finance course and some specific data analysis courses. If you’re actually interested in becoming an actuary this could be really helpful.