John Dickson

I am an aspiring actuary working towards my ASA. I am quickly able to adapt to any environment I am placed in, task I am assigned, or team I join. Most of my education and employment have required me to quickly learn foreign concepts and programming languages to produce creative solutions to novel challenges, often times with little guidance.

As an undergraduate researcher under Dr. Joseph Atwood, I developed an R script to evaluate a number of "value at risk" modeling and estimation techniques. His research is primarily interested in creating a more robust and more accurate model for estimating value at risk for portfolios of assets as well as stand alone assets. My job was to create a tool he could use to evaluate current models as well as provide the framework for additional models to be implemented and tested.

I worked on a project for a class that was also under Dr. Joseph Atwood which centered around portfolio optimization, in the same vein as the research he was performing himself. The goal of my group's project was to minimize the yearly payments into a variable annuity in deferral for 30 years that would be used to purchase a 30-year guaranteed term 3% yielding annuity at the end of the savings period, such that, our 5% value at risk of payments during retirement is $50,000. Our hypothetical investment portfolio consisted of seven common stocks whose returns were simulated out in R over the savings period using their dependency structure and multiple bootstrapping techniques containing stochastic elements. Using R we then applied our linear optimization model to determine the minimum yearly savings payment into the portfolio.