Laura Sime
- By AMS Staff
- Jun 5, 2023
Laura Sime, head of Catastrophe Modeling Support at AXIS Re, on what courses/skills beyond the required math and science courses she thinks would be the helpful to individuals wanting a career in the profession.
“I’m one of less than a dozen people here with an atmospheric science background, although there are a lot of physical sciences, business, finance, econ, and other STEM majors represented throughout the company. For classes, some amount of programming experience is good to have. The business world still runs on Excel, so learning how to use Pivot Tables and VBA is valuable, as is presenting your findings clearly and concisely. Catastrophe modeling has a lot of semi- or unstructured data and associated cleaning activities. If you have worked with cleaning up weather station time series data, that work is applicable. Business or finance classes are also useful. An intro to insurance would be even better if it’s available at your school. Whatever you take, find passion in it.”
— Laura Sime, head of Catastrophe Modeling Support at AXIS Re, on what courses/skills beyond the required math and science courses she thinks would be the helpful to individuals wanting a career in the profession.
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