COMM 110 · Year 1 · Semester 2 · 2 credits · Professional & Ethics

Technical Writing & Communication for Quants

Translating rigorous mathematics into boardroom action: the quantitative communicator's playbook.

Season 1 · 8 episodes

The Actuary's Voice: Solvency at Apex Mutual

When junior reserving actuary Maya Lin uncovers an unbooked forty-two million dollar liability gap inside Apex Mutual, she must master technical memo writing, executive data storytelling, and the ethics of professional communication before the board meeting triggers an unrated solvency crisis.

Protagonist · Maya Lin, Associate Reserving Actuary at Apex Mutual

Setting · Apex Mutual Insurance, Chicago headquarters, corporate reserving and executive boardrooms

Stakes · A forty-two million dollar reserve deficiency threatening rating agency downgrade, unhedged reinsurance renewal, and regulatory sanctions under actuarial standards of practice.

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Episodes

Season finale: Maya presents a unified, ethically unassailable actuarial memorandum to the full Board of Directors, prompting the recapitalisation of the cyber portfolio and safeguarding policyholder surplus while strictly upholding ASOP Number 41.

From the lecturer: Welcome to COMM 110. You can build the most elegant stochastic loss model or neural network in the world, but if your Chief Risk Officer, board of directors, or insurance regulator cannot understand its findings within sixty seconds, your model is worthless. This course bridges the gap between pure quantitative power and high-stakes business decisions. As you watch these lesson-films, do not treat them as passive entertainment. Have a split-screen markdown editor open, alongside a physical notepad and a red pen for line-by-line editorial surgery. Every exercise requires active drafting, ruthless editing, and rapid structural iteration. We explicitly align our standards with Actuarial Standard of Practice No. 41 (Actuarial Communications) and the professional communication competencies required across the SOA Decision Making and Communication (DMAC) module and CAS fellowship exams. You will practice bottom-line-up-front (BLUF) structuring, chart decluttering, plain-English translation of complex probability distributions, and the ethical presentation of quantitative uncertainty. Master these habits now in Year 1; they will define your trajectory as an actuarial leader.

Cold open

At seven forty-five on a rainy Tuesday morning, Chief Financial Officer Arthur Pendelton drops Maya's forty-page technical draft onto her desk. He flips straight to page thirty-eight, points at a dense wall of stochastic formulas, and asks why she buried a forty-two million dollar reserve deficit behind Greek symbols that nobody on the audit committee can decipher.

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Transcript

Classify actuarial stakeholders across decision authority and technical fluency dimensions
Apply Actuarial Standard of Practice (ASOP) No. 41 principles to define intended users and communication scope
Measure and calibrate message complexity using quantitative readability metrics and structural framing