Life as an Actuary by Mike Ziniti

For many actuaries, the path to the profession begins with a love for math—but every journey has its own twists. In this blog, Mike Ziniti, actuary at Liberty Mutual, shares his unconventional transition from high school teacher to actuarial leader, reflecting on the mentors who shaped him and the moments that changed everything.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but I became an actuary because when I was young, I really liked math and decided I didn’t want to be a teacher anymore. There’s more to the story than that, of course, but at a high level my actuarial origin story is utterly stereotypical. I have now been an actuary for 25 years, and it has been a rewarding and well-compensated career choice. My work tends to be math-adjacent, which is better than nothing, and I try to find teachable moments when I am working with new actuarial students. I still love math and sometimes I wish that I was still a high school teacher, but I am self-aware enough to know that that would probably be a bad idea.

I was unfamiliar with the actuarial career until I was already working as a high school math teacher. Becoming a teacher seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time. Throughout my schooling, I encountered teachers who recognized and nurtured my interest and abilities in math. When I was in first grade, Miss Galewski called me a “math-magician” and I have been riding that high for forty years. In high school, Mr. Green coached my Math Team and noticed that I had a natural understanding of probability. In college, Prof. Hughes Hallett recognized my interest in teaching and directed me to the undergraduate teaching program. These people, and many others, mattered to me, and I have always wanted to be able to pass that on. Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t until I was teaching full-time that I learned just how many high schoolers are not looking for that in their lives. My boss at the time, the head of the math department, suggested that I start studying for actuarial exams. I could continue teaching until I was able to switch to a new career. As unbelievable as it might seem now, with no relevant job experience and before I had taken my first exam, I actually got the first actuarial job I applied for, and I started as soon as the school year ended. This is not the track I recommend to aspiring actuaries, but sometimes you get lucky.

In the 25 years since I lucked into that first actuarial role, I have spent a lot of time learning and looking for opportunities to teach. I eventually passed all of my exams, of course, and became a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society. While I appreciated the opportunity to study new things and get back to my competitive math roots, I have found that I use a disappointingly small fraction of the material from those exams on a regular basis. But that’s okay, because I think the actuarial exam process still has significant value. In my experience, if there are questions starting with “How?” or “Why?”, whether from accounting or finance or underwriting, the Actuaries can delve into their knowledge base and provide the correct answer. I like to tell people that Actuaries serve two key roles at an insurance company. First, Actuaries ensure that the rates charged to the policyholders are both adequate and fair. Premium paid for an insurance policy should cover the expected claims costs and expenses while leaving enough, but not too much, profit to compensate the insurer for accepting the risk. Second, Actuaries ensure that enough money is set aside to pay for those expected claims costs. Claims could take a very long time to emerge (years or even decades) and some may argue that those costs will never come due. The mathematical models used to quantify both premium and loss reserves aren’t necessarily complicated, but there are multiple models for any given task, and each can produce different (often disjoint) ranges of possible outcomes. So even when most of the math is being handled by a computer, Actuaries are still useful for their understanding of different models, knowing which are appropriate for use in any given scenario, interpreting the results, and then explaining their selections and recommendations to others.

My favorite part of this job has always been working with new actuarial students in their first rotation. I love showing them new things, helping them understand the roles actuaries serve, making connections between their work and the exams they are studying for, and encouraging them to take advantage of the luck they have made for themselves.

After 25 years in the field, Mike remains passionate about sharing what he’s learned—especially with new actuarial students. His story is a reminder that while technical skills matter, curiosity, mentorship, and adaptability are what truly define a meaningful actuarial career.