Prospective students, welcome to the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science.
In this video my colleagues and I will describe the broad range of degrees offered by our Department
and hopefully address any questions you may have.
We will also explore the career opportunities pursued by our graduates and show you why one of our undergraduate
programmes is the perfect degree for you.
Currently, our Department offers three broad degrees.
These are the BCom Actuarial Science, the BCom Mathematical Sciences degree
and a Bachelor’s in Data Science called the BDatSci.
Before we discuss these degrees, notice that our statistics courses are offered to all first-year BCom students.
Also, many students find such an interest in statistics that they take it as an elective module in future years.
An actuary is a trained professional that evaluates the financial consequences of risk.
Traditionally and still today, actuaries work in the life, pensions, and insurance industries.
Actuaries use a blend of mathematical, analytical, communication, and management skills
to build products that protect clients from a probable loss in the future.
Today, business and government increasingly depend on the skills of actuaries and analysts
to help them model and plan for the future.
To become an actuary, one must complete 15 examinations through the Actuarial Society of South Africa.
However, during our three-year BCom Actuarial Science degree, students that perform excellent
academically can obtain up to eight exemptions from the actuarial examinations.
Additionally, two more exemptions can be obtained by students in their first year of postgraduate studies.
BCom Mathematical Sciences is a broad three-year BCom degree where students can shape their degree
based on one of the focal areas.
Currently the focal areas are financial risk management, data science, and operational research.
Financial risk management is a specialised field focused on a deep mathematical base that gives you
a specific application to management and measuring of market and credit and also operational risk.
These methods are applied in fields such as asset and portfolio management, accounting, economics.
Our students also pursue international professional designations such as CFA charter, as well as FRM and PRM certification.
Data science is an interdisciplinary field in which experts build algorithms and systems
to extract meaningful insight from data. Data scientists generally combine mathematics,
statistics, and computer science to build data-driven products that solve complex business problems.
The data science focal area complements the BCom Mathematical Sciences degree
by combining business and management skills with advanced mathematical and computer literacy
to perform data science tasks in any modern business.
As of 2021, our Department is hosting a Bachler’s in Data Science.
We are very proud to be the first South African university to offer this degree.
This degree is truly interdisciplinary as it spans across the faculties of Economic and Management Sciences,
AgriSciences, Natural Sciences and Arts and Social Sciences.
It is a four-year degree and students can pursue a master’s degree after completion.
Currently the degree offers eight focal areas, namely analytics and optimisation, behavioural economics,
statistical learning, applied mathematics, computer science, statistical physics,
statistical genetics, and geoinformatics. The BDatSci degree is different from the
BCom Mathematical Sciences degree with focal area in data science as it gives students the
flexibility to become a data scientist in fields other than a commerce field.
As you can tell from the content of our degrees, we are focused to prepare students
for a data-driven world in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Although all our courses have a strong mathematical foundation, we introduce students to
the most popular state of the art programming frameworks used by industries globally.
We ensure that students learn about the current trends and challenges in business
and teach them the skills required to excel in that field.
At postgraduate level our Department collaborates with various business practitioners to
align the education of our students with the skills and knowledge demanded by industry leaders.
Some classes are presented by experts in the field giving a fresh take on the theory taught in our courses.
Students can also work with industry partners on postgraduate research projects,
join our weekly seminar series that invites academics and practitioners to share their new ideas,
or take part in one of the programming competitions sponsored by local businesses.
We are the first South African university to present a Bachelor’s in Data Science.
Although this is not all we offer, data science has certainly disrupted traditional business,
which in turn changes the skill set required by our graduates.
All our courses prioritise the current skills and knowledge expected from graduates by various industry stakeholders.
Therefore we can say with confidence that our courses are relevant in today’s business and social climates.
We are confident that all our courses teach a student the scarce skills needed for the digital age.
There are too many types of career opportunity to name them all, so we will summarise a few.
Traditionally our actuary graduates pursue a career as an actuary in short- or long-term insurance.
These include life insurance, general insurance, patients and reinsurance.
Today, however, our actuaries are employed by investment
and banking and companies to evaluate financial risk, medical schemes to investigate the risk
around healthcare, and asset management companies to perform financial risk management tasks.
Looking at financial risk management, graduates generally pursue a career
as quantitative consultants, quantitative analysis as risk managers and professional services or auditing firms,
or become market, credit, and operational risk analysts at major banks or insurance.
Financial risk management graduates also become portfolio or risk managers at asset management firms.
Students completing a BCom Mathematical Sciences
with focal area data science, or those completing the BDatSci programme generally become data scientists.
In 2012 a data scientist was named the sexiest job of the 21st century.
This was a result of a 1 500% increase in job vacancies for data scientists during the 2011 and 2012 period.
Since then data science job opportunities have consistently increased. Since all companies and
organisations can gain insight from their data, data scientists are in demand in all sectors.
To name a few, data scientists work in healthcare where they develop software to help medical
practitioners diagnose and treat their patients. The commerce sector also employs many data
scientists to do things like build product recommender systems, build models for fraud detection,
or to just improve customer experience on a digital platform.
Data scientists are also building tools to combat climate change, such as Internet of Things devices to monitor
and analyse greenhouse gas emissions or remote sensing devices to identify areas with high risk of wild fires.
Given this abundance of data in today’s time, how our data are used becomes extremely important.
Data scientists play a vital role in ensuring that the technologies of tomorrow are ethical and
aligned with the views of a just society. This is a rapidly emerging field called the AI alignment problem.
Professionals working in this domain try to answer questions like, how do we control
a machine that thinks entirely different to humans or how do we ask an AI agent what to do, think,
or value such that its goals are aligned with what humans would want?
All our courses offer a strong mathematical and statistical foundation around risk and data.
Students will learn to understand the value of data and how these data-driven technologies are changing the world.
We also teach students how to build state-of-the-art software
in the most popular programming languages, like Python, R and SAS.
We all at the Department are extremely excited to meet our prospective students
and to start introducing you to the world of data and computational thinking.