I said yes, and when asked what type of insurance I wanted to move into, I always said life insurance. It wasn't until today that I was struck with the reality of my job.

I was told to check the claims database - that is each and every claim made in the past year to make sure dates are consistent, data is inputted correctly etc. Mind you, this is a spreadsheet with 50 x 15000 cells and I was just focused on a few columns, so it wasn't until after working on it for an hour or two that I realised there were three rows that described the cause and nature of death of each individual. I sat there for an hour reading this. Things ranged from "Motor vehicle accident" to "cancer" to "self-inflicted injury - suicide". Right next to these comments was a number that showed whether the claim was accepted (0) or rejected (reason with number 1 to 6). As I read through them, it was almost as if I was paying respect to each and every person in the spreadsheet - I couldn't believe these were actual people's names. Their date of birth was there, their occupation, and what surprised me the most was the date they passed away was listed under a column named DOI - Date of Incident. It felt like I had narrowed all these 15000 lives to one spreadsheet, to a file of data, performing formulaic calculations on numbers in their lives that meant nothing to them and actually mean nothing to us. Those people who were rejected claims because they did not meet the conditions of the policy, I could see it all there, it was so raw.

I will never forget the time I spent scrolling through that spreadsheet, matching dates and identifying duplicates when really, I was dealing with information of people's lives. 

Makes me wonder what everyone else asks: what do actuaries really do?