From Dark Matter to Data: My Journey to Becoming an Actuary

There is no single path to becoming an actuary, and Travis Tanaka’s journey is proof of that. Today, Travis serves as Assistant Vice President, Data & Analytics at Island Insurance Company and volunteers as a mentor for The Actuarial Foundation’s Modeling the Future Challenge (MTFC). But before building a career in insurance and analytics, he was a physics student researching dark matter and searching for his next step. In this blog, Travis shares how he discovered actuarial science, what his day-to-day work looks like, and why the profession offers opportunities far beyond what most students imagine.

During my senior year of college, I was a physics student writing my thesis on detecting dark matter. This morning, I was trying to figure out how to price an insurance policy where the business swallows the first hundred thousand dollars of any claim before we pay a cent. On the surface, those two problems seem completely unrelated, but both help explain why I became an actuary.

Normally, insurance pays from the first dollar of a loss. This one didn’t, and there was almost no history to tell me what that arrangement was worth. It wasn’t exactly an exam problem, but a few related concepts gave me an idea of where to start. That kind of question, the one with no clean answer, is most of my job. The work is judgment far more than arithmetic, and at a small shop like mine, where the data often isn’t enough on its own, you have to work out the story behind the numbers.

It’s a bit cliché, but I didn’t plan to be an actuary. Growing up, I wanted to be a scientist, which I attribute to my father’s work as a forensic detective for the local police department. After an uneventful high school career, I majored in physics and math at a local university, initially bound for graduate school. The dark matter project was my senior thesis in an experimental physics lab, and in another engineering lab, I helped researchers study fancy detergent. I came away from all of it with the same conclusion: I wasn’t good with my hands, and I needed a change.

Then, almost by accident, I attended a presentation by a practicing actuary at a math club meeting. Before that day, I had never heard of actuarial science. For a recently graduated STEM major with no real office experience, the ability to prove myself purely through passing exams was particularly attractive. I had no other plans, so it seemed as good an option as any.

So I started applying. I sent cold emails around town, and one company wrote back that they weren’t hiring actuaries but did have a general insurance internship I could try for. The company’s Senior Vice President told me he interviewed me because my resume looked nothing like everyone else’s. That unexpected opportunity changed the course of my career. When the internship was up, there wasn’t an open role to put me in, so they made one. He became my boss for the better part of a decade and is still a mentor today, himself a non-traditional actuary who had a large influence on my career journey.

On any given day, I might be pricing a new insurance product, helping a team uncover trends hidden in years of data, or meeting with business leaders to solve a strategic challenge. I still do plenty of the traditional work, setting the price of our policies and making sure we’ve put aside enough money for the claims we know are coming (and, once, something to do with a lava flow), but less than half my time goes there now. The rest goes to leading a data and analytics team and getting the whole company a little more curious about data and the stories it can tell. Most of that work, it turns out, is less about being the smartest technical person in the room and more about pointing the right people at the right problems, which makes it more management than math. Underneath all of it, the numbers connect to real people and businesses we actually help.

The math got me in the door, but the data expertise that grew out of it, and the knack for explaining it in plain English, are what carried me somewhere I never planned. I only found the field because someone once stood in front of a room of math students and explained a career path none of us had ever heard of, and now I’m sometimes the one giving that talk, in case anyone in the room is as unsure of their plan as I was. Today, as an MTFC mentor, I hope to do the same by helping students see the possibilities that can emerge from a passion for math.

One of the greatest strengths of the actuarial profession is the variety of opportunities it offers. As his journey demonstrates, a career as an actuary can evolve far beyond pricing policies and passing exams, opening doors to leadership, analytics, consulting, and countless other paths. For students who enjoy solving problems, working with data, and tackling challenges that don’t always have a clear answer, actuarial science may be a career worth exploring.