Michelle Azam Mairaj is fluent in the jargon, loopholes, and intricacies of U.S. health insurance, and plans to continue her actuarial career in the health insurance sector. It was a whole new language to learn, though. Health insurance operates differently in Pakistan, where she was born and raised.
“Initially, when I came here, I was a little confused,” she said. “In Pakistan, you just walk into a hospital and pay for your service.”
This summer, Azam Mairaj is interning in the trend analytics and forecasting division of health insurance company Humana. She’s thrilled about getting in the weeds and working with granular data so she can learn how the American health insurance landscape works on a deeper level. For a left-brained math whiz who earned a bachelor of science in economics and mathematics, it’s an exciting way to see the real-life impact of the numbers she’s crunching.
“I’m not just working with data,” she said. “I’m also deriving strategies.”
Making a real-world impact is what led Azam Mairaj to the field of actuarial science in the first place. While completing her undergraduate degree in Karachi, Pakistan, she researched potential career paths and recalled an article she’d once read about actuaries and global warming. The piece illustrated how rapid climate change has created an immediate need for actuaries to calculate how home insurance should evolve with increased flooding and wildfires.
During the early days of the pandemic, Azam Mairaj became an analyst for a Dubai-based consulting firm that works with Middle Eastern insurance companies. She found it soothing to gauge how covid affected clients’ data. By conducting pricing reviews, she could pinpoint how and why the frequency and severity in claims were going up and down—logic in an illogical time.
“What I loved about my job,” she said, “was that even though there was so much uncertainty around the world, I could look at data to see what was going wrong.”
A year and a half later, after passing three of the Society of Actuaries’ seven preliminary exams, Azam Mairaj learned of Robinson’s highly rated actuarial science offerings and about the college’s scholarship offerings. She applied and received a full ride to the college’s dual Master of Actuarial Science/M.S. in Quantitative Risk Analysis & Management program.
The classes, taught by professors who actively work in the field, have been eye-opening and well worth the risk of embarking on something new. Dave Dillon, a consulting actuary who teaches a course on health insurance and risk management, has particularly influenced her. Through discussions, case studies, and articles, she “truly fell in love with health insurance.”
The practical applications of the learning material have been monumental.
“As an actuary, you need to work on your technical skills, and you need to keep studying for exams,” she said. “But you also have to understand the industry, which Robinson does a good job of prioritizing—especially for so many international students without any knowledge of the U.S. market.”