Life and Career

“So, you are good at sciences, I mean physics and biology must be your language”
This was a friends’ comment 3 years ago and that moment I realized quite a lot of people were not familiar with the term actuarial science.
Mention an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a scientist and any other career you’d wish to mention in a room full of scholars and non scholars and see how much they relate, then mention an actuary and see how wide a gaze a big number will stare at you.
Growing up I wanted to be a doctor, not for any other reason aside money. Truth be told, money is the driving force of many people prisoned in professions they never wanted to be. One morning when we were sweeping our form four classroom whose floor was half filled with potholes, a girl tripped and hit her head hard on the edge of a pothole. Her forehead tore apart and it was bad, so bad. So, everyone rushing out and about to try and find someone to do the bare minimum of taking a cloth and squeezing it on her head to stop the bleeding, someone shouted my name. You see everyone knew how badly I wanted to become a doctor. Long story short, I changed my career that morning.
Fast forward, I’m in a lecture hall as a freshman taking Bsc. Actuarial science, which I must admit by then like most people I had very little knowledge about. Unlike the stories my roommates shared about their first days in class, I realize we are very few and silent. I would tell you a lot about that day but what is important was learning that actuarial science is more or less an advanced mathematical course. You see, I was a smart student, well, I still am, but to get to this point (this point I mean final year) it has been quite a struggle, a good one though.
Like life, so is actuarial science, you have to be born to marry and to die (quite debatable with some but let’s work with this) To be born is know little about it and to accept later that whatever you knew was faint knowledge. To marry is to fall in love and embrace mathematics not only as figures but a science, to undress numbers and make solutions out of them. Now, to die is failure to get solutions at midnight, to give up social life in the peak years of your life and constantly seat at the therapist’s couch.

They say good things in life don’t come easy. Well, this might be true when you think of an average salary for a starting actuary which is roughly $133000 p.a. This is still your money driven girl writing this article but one thing for sure, there’s passion that develops from the course, things suddenly become interesting after you realize that claims in an insurance firm have been predicted way much earlier than at the event of occurrence. That the success of a business is due to failure of another, that risks should be less of accidents and more of calculations, that you can sell asset that you do not own through short selling, that winning a game is not luck but probability you see this is not rock science this is actuarial science, the brighter side of it. Then there’s this side that no one ever tells you about, not that I now will. I guess this is just part of the universe logic rules, ‘you don’t wash your dirty linen in public’.
These are many words to simply say that the decision of taking actuarial science was one of my best life decisions amongst so many bad ones and just a little advice from Aunty Betty, your carrier is your life! Choose it wisely.

I know how it feels.

 

Life is made up of choices,
A wide range of it
Life in itself is a choice.
We choose to live or we choose to die
So many of us died long ago, just corpses in living bodies.

We do not get to choose somethings though.
Well, if I had a choice my name wouldn’t be something close to what it is right now, and so is yours.
So maybe parents should wait a little longer before naming and just call us babies while at it, because clearly, our youthful age yearns for it.

We do not choose where we are born from neither do we choose where we die (the ultimate death)
We do not choose who let’s us down when we die, okay, so many did when we lived,
No mother chooses to raise a stupid son but sons choose to change that.
We do not choose to love pineapples in the midst of a lot of choices, but most importantly, we did not choose to be women. Women are born women.

Being born a woman is no one’s choice
But becoming a woman, becoming a woman is a choice.
It’s a journey of pain and we bleed from insecurities twined within ourselves
and still hold on to them so dear because they’ve proved to stay longer and those who promised.
Woman, I know how it feels.

I know about the nights you spent awake
Wondering if you could be good enough for his sake,
When he said he needed a smart woman,
Not a book smart but a shit smart woman,
So you baked yourself to make him like you
And he did, ate you raw and leaving you empty and full of hate
Doubting if someone like you could be loved

Or if someone like you could be the reason of love.
Woman, it is easy for you to protect the ones who hurt you and love the one’s who harm you because deep down you think they are doing a favor,
Of loving a girl who’s self doubt is heavier than a bag of diamonds,
Woman, I know how it feels.

I know you have stories to tell
of how your feet become sea shores to lost captains,
Of how your body had to be the victim where credentials couldn’t speak louder
Of how you’ve walked to rooms leaking the stench of your yesterday’s sorrows but still had to be strong.
You see, women like you have to be strong,
To be a woman, and to be black, is to be strong
Women always have to be strong,
You see women like you to cry is wrong
More often than not,
our meekness has been misconceived as weakness
Women always have to be strong
Strong enough
To handle pain of breaking 21 bones during labour
To bleed for 5 days with no cut
To carry life for nine months
To be submissive to a man.
Woman, I know how it feels
But I know there are times our standard descend
Our hearts left open for anyone who can make us feel more of a woman
Forgetting no one should make you
Except from the one who made you

Now, it’s time to love yourself
Knowing we did not choose to be women
But now choose to be a woman.
Love yourself like like has no hate
Learn to love like your heart will never break
Learn to love your skin
And the stretch marks in it
Learn to fix your mindset that you won’t need physical fixing.

Learn to love the image behind the mirror
And your acnes with no concealer
Woman, every time you forget this, Remember that you! Are a woman.

I know how it feels.